Testimonies

Reflections on My Testimony

Much of my life has been lived between my two ears. As I reflect upon my faith and seek to give my personal testimony, I am hopelessly coded not only to witness to what I know but to probe the foundations of my own witness. The following pages betray that intertwining and probably exceed any space limits that any self-respecting editor would impose!

A testimony is a witness about what we know to be true concerning the most fundamental questions, not only of existence in general, but our own personal life. Moreover, long before I ever heard the word “epistemology,” I sensed that it is important to know and make clear, not only what I know, but the basis of that claimed knowledge.

At the same time, I must confess that I have always had a predisposition toward a belief that life is purposeful and that behind that purpose stands a transcendent and divine order. Both as a child and an adult, I have had an almost magical feeling of awe before a universe that is not cold, uncaring, and random but one in which the glory and the love of God are manifest.

Growing up in the Church, I, of course, had reinforced not only these basic sentiments, but also the specific doctrines of the restored gospel. Many of my friends and acquaintances were not members of the Church, some not even believers at all. So, very early there were discussions, debates, and challenges concerning issues of faith. It was thus important to think about and articulate the coherence and plausibility of that which I had been taught. In a sense, I had in a simple way to make the case, first to myself, that the gospel was a “rational theology.” And, then, there were those occasions that a word, an event, a song, carried a conviction to my heart that went beyond logical discourse.

In effect, by disposition, upbringing, reflection, and experience, I was prone toward faith in God and the message of the restored gospel. But I early on realized that a testimony had to go beyond inclinations, the evidence of the senses, intellectual musings, and received wisdom. A true testimony had to be in some fundamental way definitive. Moreover, it would be architectonic, pointing to fundamentals or first things pertaining to the existence and character of God, the divinity of Christ, the calling of Joseph Smith as a prophet, and the truthfulness of his teachings. Not every question had to be resolved but those premises had to be established.

I recall as an undergraduate at Stanford University, wandering periodically into the campus chapel between classes, when I needed to get away a little bit from the hectic schedule which I often had, both in academics and beyond academics. I recall reading the words of Mrs. Leland Stanford inscribed on the back wall of the memorial chapel, “There is no narrowing so deadly as the narrowing of man’s horizon of spiritual things. No worse evil could befall him on his course on earth than to lose sight of Heaven; no widening of science, no possession of abstract truths can indemnify for an enfeebled hold on the highest and central truths of humanity.”

This is quite contrary to the advice I got in my freshman hall. I don’t know if they still do it, but in those days there were academic advisers who lived in apartments connected with the dormitory. I remember my particular adviser, a professor of English, who periodically would have some of the freshmen come to his apartment where we would hold discussions and socialize. I remember his saying that we had a duty as entering freshmen to adopt a premise or stance of agnosticism, that is to say, of systematic doubt. I thought at the time, and I have thought more since, that this is a false premise. Systematic doubt will only lead to more doubt and ultimately confusion. I thought that there must be a premise or premises in which we can put our confidence. I take those to be “the highest and central truths of humanity.”

The Foundations

When we talk about knowledge or understanding, in the elementary sense, we are really talking about the answers to three questions: what, how and why? It is a fact that modern science, in the sense of a purely empirical and experimental endeavor, has fundamentally broken with earlier scientific approaches, exemplified by Aristotle or Newton, which sought the purpose as well as the mechanics of physical reality. Those earlier scientists and natural philosophers were concerned not only with what is and how things operate, but they were very deeply concerned with why or purpose. Aristotle was peculiarly concerned with a science which has been described as “teleological” —that is, a science which is driven by concerns for the ends or purposes of that which is being examined.

Modern science tends to focus on the “how.” Indeed, the “why” question is either ignored or tends to merge with the “how” question. As science considers whatever is observed, it turns almost immediately to examining how things came to be and how they operate, but with no particular belief or expectation that there is any necessary purpose behind what is observed or the mechanism by which it came to be or operates. There is in contemporary science a bias toward accident, randomness, or chance as the basis of what happens.

Cardinal Baroni, a close colleague of Galileo, speaking of the relationship between the Book of Genesis and scientific research, argued that the Bible “tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” And yet I have the sense that how the universe goes and how to go to Heaven are linked. In the Doctrine and Covenants it is asserted that “all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal [that is, confined to the limits of time]” (D&C 29: 34). On another occasion, we read that “that which is spiritual [is] in the likeness of that which is temporal; and that which is temporal [is] in the likeness of that which is spiritual” (D&C 77:2). Our conventional distinction between the secular and the religious, the profane and the sacred, may be immediately useful but, I am convinced, is ultimately inaccurate. And our separation of the academic disciplines—whether in the sciences or the humanities—may advance specialization but miss the unity of the whole of creation.

That may all be well and good, but how can such unity and “first things” be established? One can never attain such certitude simply by ratiocination, empirical experiments, or the authority of others.

When Christ was speaking with Peter, He asked him who men said that He was, and Peter indicated that some said he was John the Baptist returned, or Elijah the Prophet, or Jeremiah or one of the other prophets. And He said to Peter, “Whom say ye that I am?” And Peter answered, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” To which Christ responded, “Blessed art thou Simon Bar-jona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto you, but my Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 16:13-17). The Apostle Paul said that no man can say that Jesus is the Christ, save through the witness of the Holy Ghost (1 Corinthians 12:3).

The premise of the architectonic knowledge is in this view faith in Christ, which faith comes through the witness of the Holy Ghost. The 93rd Section of the Doctrine and Covenants tells us that we have a spiritual genetic code, called “The Light of Christ,” which predisposes us to recognize the truth and to resonate to the truth. If that light is not suppressed by sin or by false traditions, we may be able to call upon God and, through the gift and power of the Holy Ghost, certain knowledge will be given.

The Apostle Paul argued that to believe in Christ was dependant on hearing the word of scripture and having it borne to our heart by the witness of the Holy Ghost. That hearing, in and of itself, carries the conviction that He, indeed, is the Christ. “Faith cometh,” he wrote, “by hearing and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17). The living word is expository, not argumentative; conclusive, not provisional.

One of the great questions in philosophy has always been, “Is there such a thing as self-evident truth?” Generally, the philosophical community (Immanuel Kant being the significant modern exception) has concluded that self-evident truth can only be analytical, that is to say, the result of a simple logical proposition in which the conclusion is inherent in the premise. Such self-evident truth communicates nothing pertaining to something outside of the logical formula or in the world “out there.”

The contention of the prophets is that there are, in fact, self-evident truths. Self-evident truth comes from hearing the Word, receiving the testimony of one who knows the truth, and, finally, by the compelling witness of the Holy Ghost. That was the premise of Moroni. In speaking to those into whose hands would come the plates he had inscribed and protected, he counseled that they ask of God concerning their truthfulness. (Moroni 10:4-5). Indeed, that is the fundamental premise of the Restoration, which began with the counsel of James, “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him.” But as you recall, it went on, “Let him ask in faith” (James 1:5-6). Faith in what or whom? Faith in Jesus Christ, which faith has itself been confirmed by the witness of the Holy Ghost.

All empirical knowledge of origins and mechanisms is provisional. It is subject to further enlightenment, further understanding, different instruments of observation, different analytical premises, propositions, or theoretical constructs by which we try to make sense of the things we observe. That is how science advances, as it should.

But there is a knowledge which undergirds that and which is more certain. Though it may not be complete at any particular time, it has about it an air of permanency—in the words of Jean Jacques, “eternal, unchanged, evermore,” overstepping the limits of time. It is that knowledge which comes through faith in Christ and by the witness of the Holy Ghost.

It is also a fact that learning by faith implies action. Joseph Smith went into a grove of trees, not asking which church was true but asking which church he should join. He went in there seeking counsel as to how he should act. Knowledge that comes through the Spirit is not simply abstract learning; it is transformational learning.

In the first instance, it transforms the mind. We literally have a change of mind. As the Apostle Paul said, concluding his discussion on the knowledge that comes from the Spirit, we have the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:11-16). That mind impels a change of thought and action quite different from that which is apart from it.

Moreover, I am struck with the response of the father of Lamoni to the preaching of Aaron: “O God, Aaron hath told me that there is a God; and if there is a God, and if thou art God, wilt thou make thyself known unto me, and I will give away all my sins to know thee…” (Alma 22:18). If one wishes definitive knowledge, one must be prepared to make radical change. It is possible to be a good physicist or historian without being a good man. It is apparently impossible to know the “highest and central truths of humanity” without being prepared to transform one’s character.

In the Doctrine and Covenants we read the counsel to let virtue garnish our thoughts, and then the doctrine of the priesthood as the dew from Heaven would distill upon our souls and our confidence would wax strong in the presence of God. The Holy Ghost would be our constant companion, and our scepter, an unchanging scepter of righteousness (D&C 121:45-46). We shall think as Christ would think and act as Christ would act. As we come to greater knowledge, it implies that we will immediately translate that greater knowledge into greater righteousness and, as we do so, we ascend an ever higher mountain, and we can see further than we’ve ever seen before. The knowledge of Heaven is further revealed to us. We can see deeper and further because we have ascended a higher mount which takes us from the “what” and the “how” to the most profound of the “why” questions.

The Apostle Paul held that false understanding and disordered thinking were at the very foundation of personal and general apostasy. He spoke of a reprobate mind, defined as unprincipled or depraved, and held that the carnal, the worldly or sensual, mind is “enmity against God” (Romans 1:28; 8:7). The great tragedy of an apostate society is, he wrote, “having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart” (Ephesians 4:18). And he was fully aware that this blinding of the heart, this creation of a reality and an identity inimical to God, was because of the machinations of the cosmic world of evil. He saw the struggle as against “the authorities and potentates of this dark world, against the superhuman forces of evil” (Ephesians 6:12 NEB). One is reminded of John Milton’s portrayal of Satan in his epic Paradise Lost, where Satan exclaims, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven.”

The great struggle for truth and righteousness is in the first instance played out in the mind of each one of us. Who we are and our relationship to Deity depend upon what we focus our thoughts upon and how we cultivate the sentiments of the mind. Hence, Paul counseled us to be “transformed by the renewing of [our] minds” and to put on the whole armor of God, the armor of truth, integrity, peace, and faith, which first spring to life within the mind. (Romans 12:2; Ephesians 6:13-16) Then will we be able to stand and to withstand the challenges of life—knowing who we are and knowing the Father and His Son, being led and taught by the Holy Ghost.

Once we have submitted ourselves to Christ as master and teacher, our passions, appetites, and even the imaginations of our heart are disciplined by that great teacher, and we come to know the truth more profoundly, and we understand that which is good and how we should act and how we should think. I believe with Plato that, not only do we have a higher understanding of that which is true and good, but as well that which is ultimately beautiful. Our senses are more greatly attuned to the harmony of Heaven, and we see things and hear things and understand things and feel things in a more profound way. The noise of much of contemporary society is blocked out.

Knowledge from Heaven: “God shall give unto you knowledge by his Holy Spirit, yea by the unspeakable gift of the Holy Ghost” (D&C 121:26, 33).

I have been surrounded, in the words of Paul, by “a cloud of witnesses.” But the core of my testimony comes from witnesses of the Spirit which I cannot deny. Such witnesses, I have discovered, depend on acting on the promptings, most significantly in changing the way I live. I have an intellectual conviction of the truthfulness of the restored gospel, strengthened by interaction with good men and women. Such conviction may, however, always be subject to doubts. Transcending such understanding and its periodic doubts and anxieties, however, is the knowledge received by the Holy Ghost, which is in a deep sense ineffable. I thus often remark that, while I have many questions, I have no doubt.

I have recounted on many occasions how in my sixteenth year I sought in prayer a confirmation of the validity of the Book of Mormon. I was moved to ask that question, not only by the famous exhortation in Moroni 10:4, but by Moroni’s invitation in his concluding words, “Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourself of all ungodliness…his grace is sufficient for you” (Moroni 10:32). So powerful was that confirmation that I have confronted the various challenges to the Book of Mormon with equanimity and the confidence that every question would in time be answered—which they have and continue to be.

As I have sought to follow the precepts of the gospel and to sacrifice and consecrate as called upon, one door of “pure testimony” after another has swung open. Such openings have been manifest in large and small ways.

In a remarkable way, my testimony borne of the Holy Ghost has come in response to Church calls. I have never sought for position or “callings,” but I have had inbred a sense of duty in response to such calls. Despite inconvenience or some (generally misplaced) sense of sacrifice, I have always accepted the call to serve. Over the years it has become apparent that the calls were acts of grace by which I came to know more profoundly the truth that would make me free.

As a young man, I had always assumed that I would serve a mission. It was part of my family culture. But I would be less than candid if I said that I went on a mission with a profound desire to share the gospel. Yet that experience in retrospect shaped in myriad ways the whole trajectory of my life. The general experience deepened my testimony, but I still thrill with the memory of specific incidents in which the Spirit spoke directly to mine.

When I went on my mission I had questions and some concerns concerning Joseph Smith’s teaching about the nature of God the Father. It is worth noting that before going on my mission, I had studied what was called academic French—that is, I was taught to translate written French into English. I never heard it, spoke it, or wrote it, but I could translate it with some facility. Hence, when I arrived in Geneva, Switzerland, I was completely at sea; I could not understand anything or say anything. Write it down for me and I would be OK! I could give a simple “door approach,” but that was it. One day my companion was giving a discussion to an investigator and I sat, as usual, uncomprehending. Suddenly, without any immediate awareness, I understood everything that was being said. I realized that my companion had stumbled into a discussion on the very thing that had troubled me. Without thinking I began to expound upon the teachings of the Prophet and the more I spoke the more I came to understand—and know. After the discussion, my companion said “Frere Wood, you’ve been holding out on me!” But the fact is that my facility in understanding and speaking was still months away.
On that same mission, I remember meeting President Henry D. Moyle and Elders Hugh B. Brown and Richard L. Evans and receiving a vivid and direct whispering of the Spirit of their apostolic calling. Most powerfully, along with the other missionaries of the French Mission, I attended the dedication of the London Temple. I shall never forget the moment when President David O. McKay entered the room and we spontaneously stood to sing “We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet.” Some may write off these experiences as simply “inspirational moments” or a kind of youthful “hero worship,” but to this day I can feel the witness of the Spirit, external to myself, declaring the fact that the apostolic keys are upon the earth and that we are guided by a prophet.

A most powerful witness has come from my assignments in which I have had to call men and women to various positions. Many of those calls went beyond and some even seemed to defy logic, but there is no question that I was acting under the direction of the Spirit. Many times I have called people that I have never met before. My first experience as a regional representative in reorganizing a stake was with Elder L. Tom Perry. I shall never forget as we came together in the conviction that an individual that neither of us knew should be called as stake president. All alternatives were crowded out and the witness of the Spirit was unequivocal. I thought that this first experience was a tender mercy of the Lord to help me in this assignment, which, in a sense, I know it was. However, it was the beginning of an experience which was reenacted in every stake that I have visited. Often I would come home from a conference and my wife would ask, “Well?”, and the answer always came, “The Church is true!”

I believe that I have at times been called to serve simply because I was getting to be too full of myself and too taken with the cares of the world. And each time, the Spirit has guided, taught—and changed. I was taken aback recently when someone talked about Church “politics” and the fact that one “advances” in the Church because of some talent or quality of personality. In my observation and personal experience, I can say that this is wide of the mark. I have seen how ordinary individuals, with no particular charisma or skill, have been raised up as on eagle’s wings and how very talented and dynamic individuals have been humbled as they stood in the presence of the Lord. It is a fearful thing to deny this mighty work of the Spirit.

Finally, the famous opening words of Nephi as to being born of goodly parents are most applicable to my testimony. In my parents, siblings, wife, daughters and their husbands, grandchildren, and extended family, I have seen miracles and works of righteousness that confirm the divinity of the restored Church. I am awed by the rational coherence of the gospel plan and thrilled by powerful moments of inspiration. But the fruits of the Spirit that I see within my own family and among countless others bespeak eternal truth.

As long as I can remember, I have believed that Jesus is indeed the Christ and my personal savior. On occasion this has been reinforced most powerfully. I was called as a stake president in late November and, after a very busy month, Christmas Eve arrived. In my family, we have always had a simple ritual on Christmas Eve. We light a fire and some candles, turn on the Christmas tree, and have a special supper. Then we sometimes plays games or have skits and then sing some “fun” Christmas songs—e.g., Jolly Old Saint Nicholas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, etc. —and then everyone opens one present. Afterwards we transition into a more sacred observance and sing some of the great Christmas carols. I then read the story of the nativity, after which we sing one last carol and have family prayer. On that Christmas Eve many years ago, we re-enacted the annual ritual and I began to read the account of the birth of Christ. As I read, something quite dramatic happened to me: I began to see what I was reading. It was as if I were there. I began to weep and could not continue. My wife, Dixie, had to conclude the reading. Neither I nor my family will forget that tender moment. Years later, I was standing in the assembly room in the Salt Lake Temple and heard President Gordon B. Hinckley administer the oath pertaining to the Seventy, that we would bear solemn and certain witness that we know that Jesus is the Christ. My mind went back to that Christmas Eve and I thought, “There are many things I cannot do, but that I can do. I know the Word was made flesh and dwelt among men, that He atoned for all mankind, was raised triumphant from the grave, and will return in glory.”

I have been placed in one situation or another where I have had to seek the guidance of the Spirit and have literally experienced the doctrines of the priesthood distill upon my soul as the dews from heaven. (D&C 121:45) God does live, Jesus is the Christ, the Father and the Son appeared to the boy Joseph Smith, and this Church is indeed the instrument of the Lord’s purpose to save and glorify His children. All other knowledge pales in comparison.

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Robert S. Wood was released from the Second Quorum of the Seventy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during October conference of 2009, having been a member of that quorum since April 1999. He had previously served, among other callings, as a missionary in France, a bishop, a stake president, a regional representative of the Twelve, and an area authority seventy. He currently presides over the Church’s Boston Massachusetts Temple.

Dr. Wood received a bachelor’s degree in history from Stanford University and a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. He has taught at Harvard University, Bentley College, the University of Virginia, and, in the Netherlands, the University of Tilburg and the University of Groningen. At the time of his call as a general authority, he occupied the Chester W. Nimitz Chair of National Security at the United States Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, where he was dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. He twice served as director of the Chief of Naval Operations’ Strategic Studies Group.

He and his wife, the former Dixie Leigh Jones, are the parents of four children.

Posted June 2010

Conversion and testimony interest me. On the first Sunday of every month, fellow members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints bear their testimonies in the main meeting. I have been attending such meetings since before I can remember. In our own way, we each speak about conversion, God’s tender mercies, and the faith that inspires us, if only bit by bit.

In addition to personal belief, my interest in conversion and testimony is also academic. As a historian I am fascinated by individual and societal stories of transformations, changes, and conversions. We have accounts from many times and places of testimonies and conversions. Paul, in the New Testament, recounted his conversion to Christianity. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, told of his conversion in his Confessions. The testimony of Alma the Younger in the Book of Mormon typifies the miraculous change of heart that comes with conversion. And yet, historical interests have mostly been in large societal conversions. World history texts draw a student’s attention to the success of the Buddha’s message along the Silk Roads from India into East Asia and Southeast Asia. The Germanic conversions to Christianity after the collapse of the Roman Empire set the foundations of subsequent European states. Some say the conquest and conversion of the Americas after 1492 began the modern world. The conversion to Islam during Muhammad’s lifetime and the Arab conquests transformed vast swaths of Asia, Africa, and Europe. The impact of rapid Christianization and Islamization of Sub-Saharan Africa contributes to a dynamic global community in the twenty-first century. People’s choices of religious affiliation and personal belief remain an integral part of the human condition.

Conversion includes the challenges of acculturation, mixing, and mestizaje, and the documentation of those changes. In my own research interests I have explored conversion, assimilation, and personal behavior within the early modern Spanish Empire. For example, during the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain in the early seventeenth century, Juan de Idiáquez, as advisor to Philip III, commented on his concern that identifying “Christians of the heart” would be very difficult. Conversion and religious change can be extremely destabilizing, as Gauri Viswanathan has pointed out in her research about Hindus and Muslims in India. Conversion and converts bring potential suspicion into communities, asking “whose heart has changed?” I distinguish between conversion and adhesion. Adhesion refers to the attaching of individuals and societies to the surrounding community and culture. For more than three centuries the indigenous people of Spanish America eventually adhered to Catholicism, even as many European, African, and American traditions merged into a New World. However, conversion refers more powerfully to the individual experience and the mighty change of heart that Alma addresses when he preaches to the people of Zarahemla or that Paul refers to in his second epistle to the Corinthians about the fleshy tables of the heart. Looking into the past and judging someone’s motivations to convert presents a puzzle that endlessly intrigues me.

And yet, equally, my own ongoing conversion and those of my contemporaries draw my attention and love. I eagerly attend testimony meetings on the first Sunday of the month, listening for the stories of a heart’s conversion. Be it in the Laie Eighth Ward or in any other chapel of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I attend those meetings and share in the individual stories of human conversion. The stories of conversion and testimony remind me of times when personal prayers have been answered. I lived for six months while on a Church mission in Los Llanos de Aridane on the island of La Palma. With less than 20,000 residents, Los Llanos was one of the larger towns on La Palma. I learned about personal conversion, belief, and behavior during that time with just my mission companion and another pair of missionaries, becoming acquainted with the people and occasionally teaching missionary lessons. Three individuals chose to accept baptism, but initially it was just four of us on the island. After Los Llanos, I served next in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, the largest city in the islands with over 300,000 inhabitants. The LDS Church in Las Palmas had four congregations with probably one hundred people attending the neighborhood Sunday meetings. After months of small meetings in Los Llanos, with either me or my companion conducting the meetings and teaching the lessons, I loved sitting in the congregation of the Las Palmas IV Branch Sunday services. I can still recall the joy and inner peace I felt to be one with the Saints and to be blessed by a shared faith in our God. Experiences like these strengthen my faith.

Believing, knowing, and doing encompass my personal and intellectual experience of conversion. Blaise Pascal’s (1623-1662) famous quotation—the heart has its reasons which reason cannot know—inspires me in the infinite study of humanity and our universal environment. My change of heart continues even as I read the testimonies posted on this website. Hardy’s choice to believe, Bushman’s “mostly practical” answers, and Bitton’s obituary along with the other valuable contributors create a community of fellow saints. It’s a good place for me to be. I hope my students and children will practice this faith.

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James B. Tueller has been a member of the faculty at BYU-Hawai’i since August 1997. Before moving to La‘ie, he received his Ph.D. in history at Columbia University in New York City. He has taught at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York and BYU in Provo, Utah. Professor Tueller was born in Morocco, where his father worked as Vice-Consul in the Tangier Consulate of the United States of America. Because of his father’s assignments, he also lived in Caracas, Venezuela; Panama City, Panama; Manila, Philippines; and Madrid, Spain. His first book, Good and Faithful Christians: Moriscos and Catholicism in Early Modern Spain, was published by the University Press of the South in 2002. It examines the Morisco expulsion from Spain in 1609 and how the descendants of forcibly-baptized Christians adapted to a century’s worth of Catholicism. He currently researches and writes on the Spanish Empire in the Pacific Ocean, focusing on conversion to Christianity among the eighteenth-century Chamorros of Guam. He and his wife Beth are the parents of five children.

Posted June 2010

Making the Crucial Decision—Now

Many years ago Elder John A. Widtsoe pointed out that each of us will have questions so long as we are thinking, reflective human beings. Questions are a part of life, a vital part of growing in truth and understanding. But doubt should be only a temporary condition, a state that is resolved either through the serious pursuit and investigation of the matter under consideration—resulting in acquisition of new knowledge by study or by faith—or in a settled determination to place the question “on the shelf” for the time being, at least until new insights or perspectives are forthcoming.¹ That forward pursuit in which we do not allow the unknown to distract or beset us, is called faith. Faith is in fact the antidote to doubt, the answer to skepticism, the solution to cynicism. It is, as Alma explained, “the hope for things which are not seen, which are true” (Alma 32:21). Out of such faith flows hope, an “anchor to the souls of men which [makes] them sure and steadfast, always abounding in good works, being led to glorify God” (Ether 12:4).

Decisions, when made in earnest, when made with one’s whole heart, are extremely influential in our lives. Thirty years ago a colleague and I were asked to read through, analyze, and look for patterns in a massive amount of anti-Mormon propaganda. It was drudgery. It was laborious. It carried a bitter and draining spirit, and consequently I had to just push my way through it to complete the assignment. After a period of addressing certain questions, my partner shook his head and indicated that the constant barrage of issue after issue was simply wearing him down, and that he wasn’t sure he could stick with it. I suggested that we were almost done, that a few more hours of work would enable us to make our report. He stared at me for a moment and asked: “This isn’t damaging to you, is it? I mean, you don’t seem to be very upset by what we are reading.” I assured my friend that there were obviously other things I would rather be doing, and that the hateful and contentious spirit did in fact weigh on me, but no, I wasn’t particularly bothered by it. “Why?” he followed up. “I can’t say for sure,” I responded. “It’s ugly but doesn’t really affect my faith.”

I sat with my wife in our living room as we watched the April 2007 general conference. During the Sunday morning session, Elder Neil L. Andersen stated: “Faith is not only a feeling; it is a decision. With prayer, study, obedience, and covenants, we build and fortify our faith. Our conviction of the Savior and His latter-day work becomes the powerful lens through which we judge all else. Then, as we find ourselves in the crucible of life, . . . we have the strength to take the right course.”²

That was it. That was the answer. Faith is a DECISION. Decades ago I made a decision: I knew that God is my Heavenly Father, that Jesus Christ is my Lord and Redeemer, that Joseph Smith is a prophet of God, through whose instrumentality many plain and precious truths, the keys and covenants and ordinances of the priesthood, and the organization of the Church, have been restored. I made a decision. I decided that I would be loyal to the constituted authorities of the Church, that I was in this race for the long haul, that I would stick with the Good Ship Zion, and that I would die in the faith in good standing. No man or woman would ever chase me out of the Church. No unresolved issue or perplexing doctrinal or historical matter would shake my faith.

Now I suppose some would respond that I am either living in denial or am simply naïve. I assure you that I am neither. I have been a religious educator for thirty-five years, am very much aware of seeming incongruities that surface here and there. I spend a goodly portion of my time with people who are of different faiths, and some of them are ever so eager to bring to my attention questions intended to embarrass me or the Church. There are just too many things about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that bring stimulation to my mind and satisfaction to my heart, as well as a cementing and sanctifying influence into my family and interpersonal relationships, for me to choose to throw it all away because I am uncertain or unsettled about this or that pebble in the road. To put this another way, the whole is far, far greater than the sum of its parts.

Following the Bread of Life Sermon, many chose not to follow the Master further. Then said Jesus unto the twelve, Will ye also go away?” What a poignant moment: our Lord seems to display a sense of disappointment, a somber sadness for those in the darkness who cannot comprehend the Light. Will he be left alone? Is the price too great to pay? Is the cost of discipleship so expensive that perhaps even those closest to him will leave the apostolic fellowship? “Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God” (John 6:66-69, emphasis added). Once one has enjoyed sweet fellowship with the Christ, how does he or she turn away? Where do you go? What possible message, way of life, social interactions, or eternal promise can even compare with what Jesus offers?

Some have wandered away because they did not exercise that faith that required a decision. Consequently when something went wrong or something else didn’t seem to make sense, they chose to absent themselves from church meetings and eventually from the Church. And so if you have allowed unanswered questions in your life to develop into destructive doubts, I plead with you to think through the long-term implications of a decision to distance yourself from the Church. Ponder on what you are giving up. Think carefully on what you will be missing. Reflect soberly on what you are allowing to slip from your grasp. If you are one who finds herself struggling with a doctrinal question or a historical incident, seek help. Seek it from the right persons, including your Heavenly Father or your priesthood leaders. Be patient. Be wise. Assume the best rather than the worst. If you are an otherwise active member of the Church who finds himself overly troubled by something that should never have happened or something that can be remedied in your heart by simply recognizing that all of us are human and that forgiveness is powerful spiritual medicine, leave it alone. Let it go.³ Keep the big picture and refuse to get bogged down in exceptions to the rule. Focus on fundamentals. Simplify your life and open yourself to that pure intelligence from the Spirit that brings calmness and serenity.

Have you made a decision? Have you made the decision? Have you sought for and obtained a witness from God that the work in which we are engaged is heaven-sent and thus true? Such a quest is foundational to your future happiness and peace. Pursue it consistently and energetically. If you have received such a testimony, cherish it, cultivate it, and ask the Father in the name of the Son to broaden and deepen it. Then make the decision. Such a decision is a sacred commitment to remain true to the faith, even though you, like Nephi, “do not know the meaning of all things” (1 Nephi 11:17). In a modern revelation we are counseled to “search diligently, pray always, and be believing.” As we do so, “all things shall work together for [our] good” (D&C 90:24, emphasis added).

Notes:
¹ Widtsoe, Evidences and Reconciliations (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1960), 31-33.
² Conference Report, April 2007, 72-73, emphasis added.
³ See Boyd K. Packer, Conference Report, October 1977, 89-92; October 1987, 17-21.

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Robert L. Millet is Abraham O. Smoot University Professor of Religious Education and Director of Publications for the Religious Studies Center at Brigham Young University.

Professor Millet is a native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in psychology from BYU and a Ph.D. from Florida State University in religious studies. After working with LDS Social Services and with LDS Seminaries and Institutes, he joined the BYU Religious Education faculty in 1983. He has served as chairman of the Department of Ancient Scripture and as dean of Religious Education, and has held the Richard L. Evans Chair of Religious Understanding. His areas of expertise include the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, doctrinal content in the Book of Mormon, outreach to other Christian faiths, and Christian history and theology.

He and his wife, the former Shauna Sizemore, are the parents of six children.

See, additionally, Professor Millet’s chapter in Expressions of Faith: Testimonies of Latter-day Saint Scholars.

Posted June 2010

Science, Zen and Mormonism: Social Ways of Knowing
A Personal Reminiscence by Mark A. Riddle

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that science, Zen and Mormonism are three valid ways of knowing; each promises that a specified program of training will enable one to become a knower of a particular kind of knowledge.

LDS Knowledge Claims

Latter-day Saints make extraordinary knowledge claims based on religious experience. Parley P. Pratt (1807-1857) described his first encounter, in 1830, with The Book of Mormon this way:

I opened it with eagerness and read its title page. I then read the testimony of several witnesses in relation to the manner of its being found and translated. After this I commenced its contents by course. I read all day; eating was a burden, I had no desire for food; sleep was a burden when the night came, for I preferred reading to sleep.

As I read, the spirit of the Lord was upon me, and I knew and comprehended that the book was true, as plainly and manifestly as a man comprehends and knows that he exists (Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt, Proctor edition, 2000, pp.31-2).

Pratt’s claim to knowledge echoes Descartes’s rationalist knowledge criteria, clear and distinct. Pratt subsequently became an influential early advocate for Mormonism. His autobiography is still read among the LDS today.

Another historically significant, early knowledge claim was that of Lorenzo Snow (1814-1901), who in 1898 became the Church’s fifth president. He wrote that, a short time after his baptism in 1836,

I began to reflect upon the fact that I had not obtained a knowledge [emphasis in the original] of the truth of the work…, and I began to feel very uneasy.

Retiring to his usual place for prayer in a grove near his home, after nearly being dissuaded from praying by a “gloomy, disconsolate spirit,” he experienced an ineffable spiritual ecstasy:

I had no sooner opened my lips in an effort to pray, than I heard a sound, just above my head, like the rustling of silken robes, and immediately the Spirit of God descended on me, from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, and O, the joy and happiness I felt! No language can describe the almost instantaneous transition from a dense cloud of mental and spiritual darkness into a refulgence of light and knowledge, as it was at that time imparted to my understanding. I then received a perfect knowledge [emphasis added] that God lives, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and of the restoration of the holy Priesthood and the fullness of the Gospel…” (Eliza R. Snow Smith, Biography and Family Record of Lorenzo Snow, 1884, pp.7-9)

Note that Snow’s experience included both ecstatic and informational aspects. My own understanding of, and willingness to attribute credibility to, the experiences of Pratt and Snow and countless other such knowledge claims I have heard made by LDS over the course of six decades is based on a religious experience of my own—in 1954. The site was the old (then relatively new) ward house of the Provo 8th Ward at 500 E and 200 N in Provo, Utah. Our ward was abuzz with the news that Jamie Beecroft (the only name by which I remember him) had returned from his mission. It was my first Sunday to meet with “the big kids” of the Sunday School after my baptism, I having met until then with “the little kids” (I was a child eight years old). The class met on the stage of the recreation hall, facing north, and I was seated on the right side of the group, close to the front. Elder Beecroft spoke to our group of 15-20 youngsters and expressed his testimony that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the true church of Jesus Christ. As he spoke those words I felt in my heart something I had never felt before and have never felt in quite the same way since. It was simultaneously a warm feeling in my bosom, a spiritual infusion of what I will here denominate “tangible light,” and an intelligible message, which was that what Elder Beecroft was telling me was true. At the same time, I knew that the witness communicating to me was the Holy Spirit because the message included that assertion.

In the intervening 50+ years I have felt the Spirit in my heart many times, but never with precisely that same message—one such experience was my quota. I’ve since had similar feelings about principles of truth as I read the scriptures or listened to the inspired word of God. I’ve received impressions ranging from hunches to specific verbal instructions, but never again that same message with that degree of clarity. On the basis of what I learned that day in 1954, I have testified to thousands in many congregations in Japan and several states of the U.S. that “I know that…” the LDS Church is the church of Jesus Christ.

In my own mind, this knowledge claim is justified by the experience with the Spirit I had as an eight-year-old boy; and in retrospect I think this knowledge of mine has been rather robust, as knowledge goes. It has survived a sullen adolescence, a disposition to waywardness, divorce and sundry other personal disasters, a lifetime of stubborn non-conformity; it has endured five decades of voracious and open-minded reading, including exposure to all kinds of religions and philosophies; it has stood the test of time. The purpose of this essay is to explore both the personal and social dimensions of this knowledge claim of mine, and to compare LDS knowledge claims to those of science and Zen.

Personal Knowledge

Let’s examine some of the characteristics of my knowledge claim. The knowledge I claim above is an example of personal knowledge. There are separable issues here—whether or not the content of what I claim is true, and whether or not I really know what I claim to know. No one else would be justified in asserting as true, on the basis of my experience, what I claim to know. A separate religious experience could verify the content of my claim, for another person, and in principle even the veridicality of my particular experience could be established by another in this way. We will see later that this is a key to the LDS social experience.

My experience itself, however, is in principle not accessible to others, and my belief that another person has gained from personal experience of her own the same knowledge that I gained from my experience is based on the similarity of our verbal descriptions (a rational criterion), or observation of the behavioral consequences (a pragmatic criterion), or on a separate spiritual experience confirming her experience (empirical evidence of a spiritual kind).

My knowledge claim is falsifiable, on the other hand, by knowledge contradicting either the truth of the proposition expressed (that the LDS Church is the church of Jesus Christ), or the reality of my experience, or the validity of the method of learning truth from religious experience. Because truth claims based on unexaminable personal experiences are necessarily private, those wishing to share knowledge gained in this way can only bear witness to what they have learned and hope that their hearers either believe the witness or have a credible experience of some kind confirming the message.

Such claims are easily dismissed in many ways, for example by finding contradictions in the message, by making knowledge claims contradicting the message (both rational criteria), by observing that I am not a credible witness (a pragmatic claim) or that the method of gaining knowledge by personal religious experience is not reliable (another pragmatic claim). Unfortunately, some persons reject witness based on personal religious experience because of a worldview which denies, a priori, apart from the merits of any particular witness, that such experiences can be real or convey meaningful content.

The Latter-day Saint is, on the other hand, constantly encouraged to develop personal knowledge by learning directly from the Holy Spirit, and is often taught how to do so.

Social Knowledge

Personal knowledge claims have a social dimension as well. The languages in which they are expressed, and their ethical implications and practical consequences—these are all social artifacts. An important consequence of our beliefs and knowledge claims is that they are always either reinforced by social approval or we are alienated from our communities by disapproval or by being ignored.

On one occasion in 1975 I rode from Washington D.C. to a weekend political retreat in New Jersey with a D.C.-area sociologist who told me, upon learning I was a LDS, of an experience he’d had some years previous. He’d awakened from a nap one day to find his deceased mother standing at the foot of his bed. She told him not to worry, that there was a purpose to life, and then she vanished. He told me he did not know what to make of the experience. Because the epistemological community with which he self-identified (the community of social scientists) has naturalistic premises, he had no choice but to view the experience as anomalous. But at the same time it seemed real; he was conflicted because he recognized the experience was a challenge to his worldview. He told me about it because he was aware that someone with a different metaphysical and epistemological frame of reference, someone like me, could find the experience credible and meaningful. Still, it seemed that despite the discomfort it caused him, the weight of just one experience was not sufficient to cause him to shift his epistemological allegiance away from the community in which he had his training and livelihood.

Personal knowledge has a social dimension—what we can know is a function of our worldviews. For example, I believe there is a world of spirits of departed human beings because I have a mother and a son who have encountered the ghosts of the dead. I have never seen a ghost, but if I did, because of my own metaphysical predilections I would not be perplexed by the experience, wondering what to make of it; it would “fit” for me and I could comfortably claim to “know” that there is a realm of departed spirits near our own.

The British New Testament Scholar J.B. Phillips (1906-1982) reported (in The Ring of Truth [NY, 1967]) that C.S. Lewis (1888-1963) appeared to him and helped him translate a difficult passage of the Bible. Students of folklore know well that, besides seduction and betrayal, nothing is more well-attested in the record of human experience than ghostly apparitions, and yet it seems to be easy to dismiss such claims as nonsensical if you are in possession of a naturalistic worldview.

Consider, for example, the claim of Rene Descartes (1596-1650), arguably the founder of both modern science and modern philosophy, that on the night of November 10, 1619, the Angel of Truth appeared to him thrice in a dream and taught him the foundations of the contributions to knowledge for which he later became famous. Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), French Thomist philosopher, a convert to Catholicism, analyzed Descartes’ account at length in The Dream of Descartes (NY: Philosophical Library, 1944), but many histories of science and philosophy pass over Descartes’ claim in evidently embarrassed silence, a humanistic or naturalistic worldview having predisposed them to reject it out of hand. Maritain’s Catholic worldview likely predisposed him to take seriously the idea that a young Descartes could have learned something from an angel, whereas a humanistic or naturalistic worldview would predispose one to reject it out of hand. These worldviews, the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions on which our knowledge is based, are social artifacts, determined not by any individual but by the historical processes of a culture, a society. We shall see below that our worldviews determine our observations of the world, not vice versa.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints offers to the sincere learner a social context which both reinforces and disciplines the personal search for knowledge obtainable by experience with the Holy Spirit. Discipline is provided for the seeker by Church leaders who provide guidance and correction to the novice, channeling the search for personal knowledge into paths known to be useful to the larger community of believers, avoiding the tendency to schism which can otherwise result from seeking personal knowledge.

Zen

Social confirmation of knowledge claims is the sine qua non of Zen (Chinese ‘Chan;’ Korean ‘Seon’). In the Zen sect of Buddhism, one cannot properly claim to have achieved satori, true insight, the goal of every practitioner of Zen, without having been examined by, and having received the confirmation of, a Zen master. Practically speaking, this means that one cannot make the claim to have attained liberation from illusion without completing an apprenticeship to a Zen master. Even serious students of Zen are prone to become prematurely, erroneously convinced that they have achieved enlightenment. An important function of the teacher is to distinguish these delusions from the real thing. Zen claims many unbroken lineages of such master-to-disciple approval going back many centuries to Bodhidharma, said to have come to China from India in the sixth century.

What the content of the Zen satori insight is, then, cannot be authentically known for sure outside of the tradition. Whether the disciple’s understanding is really the same as the master’s, and whether that understanding has really remained uniform over the centuries may not be knowable at all, but my own decades of experience as a Zen enthusiast have led me to believe that there is a core insight which has likely long continued in the tradition, and that this insight expresses important truths about the mind.

My first Zen experience occurred in the outskirts of Nagoya, Japan, at sundown on a fall day in 1967. At sunset I was riding my missionary bicycle back to home base after a day spent “tracting” in a semi-rural area; the sunset was a spectacular shade of red and I was completely caught up in its grandeur. Wanting to share my rapture, I noticed an older woman coming toward me, no doubt returning home, as I was, from a day of hard work in the fields; she was dressed in the drab costume Japanese farmers had worn for centuries and carried a grubbing hoe over her shoulder. Pointing to the west I said “Kirei desu ne!” (Pretty, isn’t it!) Without turning backwards to see the view I was enjoying, her quiet reply was “Akakute ne” (Sure, it’s red, isn’t it?). But whereas my tone was full of youthful, American optimism, her tone spoke an aching weariness from the labor she and her peasant ancestors had endured since time immemorial. Her words produced in my brain a physically palpable reaction, which I have since come to associate with the “turning of the mind inside out” spoken of by Zen masters. Somehow my mind gained access not only to her perspective, but to a sense of her generations, as well. Now, I understand one of the often-cited slogans of Japanese Zen, “Ware tada taru o shiru” (I know only sufficiency) as reflecting what I learned in Nagoya that day in 1967—that every sunset, red, gray or whatever, come what may, is sufficient for me. My sense of the inadequacy of this description of what I learned is, for me, an example of the much-mooted “ineffability” of Zen insights.

My next Zen experience occurred just a few weeks later while sitting on a bench on the grounds of a Zen temple in the eastern part of the city of Kyoto. I was looking at the gravel under my feet; I noticed particularly the bright, shiny, colorful stones—shades of reddish, greenish, bluish hues. Suddenly my field of perception was inverted, and my valorization of the pebbles reversed: now it was the drab colors which caught my eye and my preference. Then I realized that by exercising my will, I could change the focus of my field of perception back and forth between the two kinds of gravel, the two states of awareness, feeling an emotional reversal as well, as I switched back and forth. I then stood up and it occurred to me that the whole world was a bed of gravel writ large—I was as capable of positively valorizing (investing with value) the plain, simple and ordinary as I was of noticing and being enticed by the gaudy, the flashy, and the ornate. My life since that day has been a search for the unadorned.

For me, the “non-duality of subject and object” spoken of by the Zen philosophers refers to what I learned in Kyoto—that I can change my world by changing my mind, or change my mind by changing my world. An ideal of mine has long been the Zen priest I once saw in simple garb, unpretentiously and leisurely raking up the fallen leaves on the grounds of his ancient temple home, and the relaxed resilience which seemed clearly evident to me in his every move. In contrast with the simplicity of Japanese Zen, much of my own American culture has come to seem excruciatingly garish.

It was in the Zen garden on the grounds of the Huntington Library in San Marino in 1991 that I realized in another flash of insight how the Zen garden is an expression of the Zen philosophy of mind: the rock garden carefully raked into artificial patterns of perfect and very unnatural symmetry leaves undisturbed, and even highlights, the most prominent natural features of the landscape, several large boulders.

From my study of Zen I have convinced myself that these experiences and insights have given me at least a partial understanding of satori, but whether any of these experiences really qualify me to be any kind of a knower in the Zen tradition, I cannot be sure. For although I have read and thought Zen for decades, I have never had occasion to submit my insights to a Zen master to request his imprimatur, and therefore I have no warrant to claim that I have any idea what Zen really is, and the claims I have just made to understand something of the Zen experience, though sincere, may not be legitimate from the orthodox Zen point of view.

Zen and Mormonism

What Zen and Mormonism have in common is they both foster a personal knowledge based on religious experience. At first glance the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would seem to be more open than Zen to all those wishing to make public their knowledge claims, since our public meetings are open to anyone wishing to participate, and, monthly, each congregation’s podium and microphone are made available to all comers to bear witness of what they know. And Mormons are required to judge for themselves the authenticity and validity of their own knowledge. In Mormonism, there is no formal designation of approval granted, as there is in Zen, whereby one becomes acknowledged as a knower of the truth.

But actually, Mormonism is more like Zen than it might seem to the casual observer. Consider the following: before being baptized, those wishing to join the community are required to witness to its members that they have truly repented of all their sins (see D&C 20:37). Those who subsequently sin can be banned from speaking in the Church’s meetings. (This implies a recognition that sin has a potentially corrupting influence on the content of one’s knowledge, and limits what one can publicly claim to know.)

Furthermore, those who are called to teach the community are persons judged by its leaders to be genuine witnesses of the truth. This highlights something mentioned above, something which Zen and Mormonism have in common—each requires that the veridicality of knowledge claims based on inherently unexaminable, internal, personal religious experiences be interpersonally verifiable. For Zen, the verification is accomplished by means of the interrogation of a novice by a master, whose own insight prepares him to recognize enlightenment in others. The ones successfully certified by examination in this way obtain a lifetime license to teach others.

Among the LDS, on the other hand, the validation of the authenticity of religious experience and approval of knowledge claims is an on-going process: assignments to teach are limited in scope to a specific domain and period of time. Church leaders are required to make judgments about which persons are appropriate for which teaching assignments, and they are encouraged to pray and seek personal experience concerning the qualifications of others. As I listen to LDS knowledge claims, I can experience the presence of the Spirit confirming or denying the truth of what I hear. The Holy Spirit knows, and can inform me if I am receptive to it, of the validity of others’ claims to know. It is this method of interpersonal recognition and validation of private religious experience which constitutes the lifeblood of the true church of Christ.

Science

Whereas both Zen and Mormonism foster personal knowledge, with varying methods of social confirmation required for authoritative knowledge claims, it is asserted of science that it fosters public knowledge, and that the knowledge claims of those who do science are claims which anyone can verify; on close examination, this assertion turns out to be false. While it’s true that one can authoritatively claim to know the truth of scientific matters without having to repent or sit in meditation for years under the tutelage of a master, it turns out that there are in science limits on knowing analogous to the requirements made of knowers in both Mormonism and Zen.

Not just anyone can know that the propositions of science are true. In science, as in Mormonism or Zen, only specially qualified persons can be knowers. In my high school chemistry class I often failed to get “the right result” in simple demonstrations of chemical principles. Were I asked today to walk into a chemist’s lab and “verify” his findings, I would be completely out of my element, not because I cannot physically see what the chemist sees—the fluids in tubes, the computer printouts of results, or whatever, but rather because I cannot understand what is going on and therefore my observations cannot confirm those of the chemist. Just as a trained musician hears different things than I do when she listens to a symphony, so does the chemist observe a great deal more than I can in his laboratory. While we all sense the same way, we understand and verbalize our knowledge in the different ways we have been taught by our experience in various communities. So, not having been initiated into the mysteries of chemistry, I cannot repeat the chemist’s experiments; I cannot interpret the results of his experiments; I cannot confirm his knowledge claims.

This is not to deny that scientific evidence is empirical, observed with the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. It is, and my five senses work as well as the chemist’s, and I could be taught to know what he knows in the way that he knows it. But for now, any claim I could make to know even the most fundamental propositions of chemistry would be based upon my trust in the authority of science, an authoritarian rather than an empirical epistemology.

Now, trust in authority is not a bad thing; on the contrary, it is necessary to the development of knowledge communities. No young person would labor to learn science, or sit for meditation in zazen, unless that person was able to trust that the result would be an increase of valuable knowledge. To trust in the word of God, to perform the experiment on it advocated by Alma and Amulek (Alma 32:27, 33, 36 and 34:4) is a necessary preliminary to knowing of their surety and truth. Jesus promised:

My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me. If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself (KJV, John 7:16-17; emphasis added)

We shall see that the trust required of those who would put this promise to the test is analogous in every way to the trust required of neophytes by both science and Zen.

Now, all of this is common sense—even empiricist philosophers who insist on the criterion of publicity for knowledge, that the grounds for asserting something to be true or false be available for testing by others, “all who are normally qualified,” admit that to be so qualified can involve specialized knowledge (of, for example, advanced mathematics) or expensive training necessarily limited to a privileged few (learning to “read” an X-ray, for example). But in thus limiting and qualifying the specification of who can know to those adept at science, empiricists seem to have ceded the ground, epistemologically, to advocates for both Mormonism and Zen.

Even the demand of positivistic philosophers such as Sterling M. McMurrin [1914-1996] that, for a knowledge claim to be testable—that is, in order for it to be expressible as a proposition that can be verified or falsified—it must be possible to “describe the method by which the proposition would be verified if it were technologically possible to have the experiences relevant to verification” actually leaves the door wide open to the knowledge claims of both Zen and LDS philosophers who are able to “describe the method” by which their claims may be verified by anyone willing to submit to their respective conditions for knowledge (McMurrin, Mormonism and Logical Positivism [1990], available in his collected papers at the Marriott Library, University of Utah, p.17; emphasis added).

McMurrin denies the validity of knowledge claims based on methods available only to “a few persons who presume to have access to esoteric methods that cannot be generally shared” (op.cit.), but if the word “esoteric” does not apply to the work done by cosmologists such as Steven Hawking, then the word has no meaning. It turns out that the methods for knowing for both Zen and Mormonism are ways which can be described and can be shared—with any who are able and willing to pay the price.

Science and Mormonism

To qualify for membership in the scientific community one must first subscribe to the community’s ethos, or value system, which emphasizes such things as curiosity, close observation, careful measurement, experimentation, disinterested objectivity and patience in the face of uncertainty, veracity in reporting results, and willingness to publicize findings. These are not universal human values, and the scientific community is thus a distinct subset of humankind.

Similarly, admission into the community of Latter-day Saints requires that one be willing to give up one’s sins and make the commitment of baptism to bear others’ burdens and to stand as a witness of God at all times and in all things, and in all places, even until death (Mosiah 18:8-9). Mormons make the startling claim that to anyone willing to conform to these requirements will come the companionship of a tutor able to teach “the truth of all things” (Moroni 10:5). That these conditions rather severely limit the number of persons knowing in the Mormon way is freely granted; likewise, there aren’t many Zen masters. But cosmologists able to judge Steven Hawking’s claims are also few in number; in principle, on this ground the three ways of knowing are not unequal. In terms of the number of years, degree of effort and expense required, the three ways are comparable: Mormon knowledge is probably linguistically and culturally more easily accessed than that of Zen. The tithing requirement makes it as expensive as science, but assuming one is willing to attempt to qualify, it is easier to become a Mormon knower than to get admitted with a fellowship to graduate school in a field of science, since openings for the latter are restricted in number and there are fewer opportunities than competitors for them.

The objection can be made that, whereas the knowledge claims of science are verifiable by “all who are normally qualified” (the phrase is from McMurrin) through use of the five human senses, both Zen and Mormonism impose the requirement that additional, allegedly “non-empirical” ways of knowing be developed. We can grant that Zen and LDS ways of knowing require the development of senses beyond the basic five and still maintain the privileged status of empirical ways of knowing, an important cultural value for many, by arguing for the reality of human sensibility beyond the basic five senses, and the legitimacy of knowledge gained by their use (hence the interest in paranormal psychology, “extra-sensory perception,” among some New Age Zen enthusiasts).

It is possible to make a case that for LDS, the Spirit communicates via the five senses, especially the sense of feeling, but in my view the recognition of a separate spiritual sense would be more helpful (hence my long-standing interest in the Moral Sense school of philosophy). Personally, I have no problem admitting into my own bag of mental tools a moral sense (the phenomenon of conscience, sensible to anyone willing to admit it, and even discomfortingly sensible sometimes to those who aren’t) distinct from the sense of feeling. As a Latter-day Saint, I associate this special sensibility with the Light of Christ.

I also admit a spiritual sense, the sensitivity of a spirit to another spirit when they touch, resulting in communication analogous to a “download” of digital information between computers. For LDS, “spirit” is also material. Joseph Smith, Jr., declared:

All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned [seen] by purer eyes; we cannot see it [now, in our impurity]; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter (see D&C 131:7-8; my interpolations added).

Combined in this passage are both metaphysical and epistemological positions: the epistemological claim is that what we can know is a function of the kind of bodies we possess; this can also be seen to be an empirical claim of sorts (after all, both infra-red and ultra-violet light are invisible to the human eye; we can understand Joseph Smith’s claim by analogy to that fact).

No doubt, as a practical matter, some sort of intellectual openness to the idea of the legitimacy of moral or spiritual sensibility provides an opening for the propagation of LDS knowledge claims. Because of this, empiricist epistemology, especially in its positivistic form, combined with naturalistic metaphysics (mechanistic materialism) has been a cultural obstacle for Mormons. Where this worldview is dominant, the Church has made little headway. Here is the crux of the matter, and at this point we must wax just a bit esoteric, philosophically.

It was American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000), as much as anyone, who knocked the legs out from under positivism. Quine made contributions to philosophy by critiquing the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions which was critical to logical positivism (which had dominated philosophy for most of the first half of the twentieth century), and advocating semantic holism, the idea that words, sentences, and propositions are meaningful only in the context of an entire linguistic system. He elucidated the principle of the indeterminacy of translation (no unique meaning can be assigned to words and sentences) as an example of a broader principle, the underdetermination of data to theory (any phenomenon can be explained by a multiplicity of hypotheses; for definitions of these terms see the Wikipedia entry under ‘Quine’).

According to Quine, a single knowledge claim cannot be tested in isolation—he advocates epistemological holism, according to which a test of one knowledge claim always depends on other theories and hypotheses. Quine saw the interpretation of perceptions as being “theory laden,” or dependent on theory: any observation can be made compatible with any theory. According to his principle of “the underdetermination of a theory by evidence,” evidence and logic alone are insufficient to determine which theory is correct: any theory can be made compatible with any observation, and it is in principle impossible to determine if a theory is false by reference to evidence. This opens the door to using other criteria for judgment, including the principles of parsimony, elegance, and utility.

Quine went as far as to say that the Greeks’ worldview of Homeric gods is comparable to, and is as credible epistemologically as, the physicists’ worldview of (unobservable) electromagnetic waves. Of course, anyone doing science will stick to the latter world-view and avoid using the former in explaining phenomena, but this is an example of the dependence of observation on theory. Quine closed his 1951 work Two Dogmas of Empiricism (one of the most celebrated papers in the history of twentieth century analytic philosophy) with an expression of ontological relativism. Quite stated that while as a lay scientist he “believed” in “physical entities” and not in Greek gods, as a philosopher he recognized that both “enter our conceptions only as cultural posits,” (that is, as postulates—assumptions used as premises in a theoretical system).

Trust

All kinds of learning begin with trust, but modern science has been especially successful in winning the confidence of its novices. “Science as taught to undergraduates,” says Ziman, “tends to be logical, precise, impersonal, and authoritative [emphasis added].”

The job of the science teacher [at this level] is to make all plain and plausible, to encourage the student to entrust [herself ] freely to the basic theory. To express doubts, to utter warnings at this stage will inhibit the confident use of the new technique, the new language. The expertise of the professional scientist is his ability to… transform every problem into the concepts and formulae of his discipline. Years of reading, lectures, laboratory classes and examinations are required [to learn to think as a physicist or chemist] (J.M. Ziman, “Education for Science” in Public Knowledge: The Social Dimension of Science, 1968, pp.71-2; emphasis and interpolations added).

The scientific community consists of those persons who have learned to speak its language. Only after enduring years of apprenticeship can the newcomer to the community be allowed to see the controversy and uncertainty, “the confusions and the errors that are always with us in the process of discovery” (Ziman, op.cit.). In the meantime, the learner must have confidence in, must trust, the authority of the community’s leaders as he or she acquires the “cultural posits” (Quine’s term; see above) of science.

It is so with Zen, also. The Zen disciple must trust that the master has real insight of great value, or he would never be willing to submit to the discipline of the master, to endure the necessary years of apprenticeship. Just so it is with membership in the Church of Christ—one begins with submission to God and parents and those having the authority “to preach the Gospel and administer in the ordinances thereof.” It takes some time to learn to speak the language of faith, to learn and gain confidence in the way things are done, to really trust in the promises made, to repent and become pure in heart as God is pure (see 1 John 3:1-3). In science, Zen, and Mormonism, initial trust, confidence, and belief makes possible the transition to knowledge.

Three Ways

It has long seemed to me that the epistemological skepticism of Quine and his successors, still standing after a half-century of scrutiny, has long since closed the door on the claims of positivists and logical empiricists that Zen and Mormonism cannot be legitimate ways of knowing, that only scientific knowledge gained by the methods of science and based on naturalistic premises is valid. What we have in science, Zen, and Mormonism are three valid ways of knowing; each promises that a certain program of training will enable one to become a knower of a particular kind of knowledge. As philosophers we can recognize with Quine the dependence of any and all “knowledge” on unproven postulates while still recognizing its utility. Science, Zen, and Mormonism all require an initial trust in the efficacy of its promise and a willingness to submit to the discipline of its leading practitioners. Science promises to produce insight into the laws which govern the natural universe; Zen offers insight into the workings of the mind; at its best, Mormonism is a community of followers of Jesus Christ who have accepted the invitation of their Lord to become through obedience to him, knowers of the knowledge he offers:

If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (KVJ John 8:31-2).

As a Latter-day Saint, I have always been free to learn whatever I could from the practitioners of both science and Zen and from any other source of truth I could find. As a member of the LDS community, I have had many opportunities to learn from scholars devoted not only to their fields of study, but also to learning from their discipleship to Jesus Christ. Science, Zen, and Mormonism—my experience has been that all three ways of knowing deliver on their promises to produce coherent, useful knowledge.

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Mark A. Riddle retired in May 2007 as an instructor of Japanese and of English as a second language (ESL) at Wasatch Academy, in Mt. Pleasant, Utah, where he chaired the ESL Department. Between 1982 and 2003, he had taught Japanese at Salt Lake Community College, Utah Valley State College, Brigham Young University (BYU), and the University of Utah, and, from 1996-1997, was an adjunct instructor of educational psychology at BYU. He also taught ESL in Japan, and owned and operated a business providing opportunities for Japanese students to study in the United States and for American students to study in Japan, as well as a company providing consultant/interpreter services.

He earned B.A. and M.P.A. degrees from BYU, and pursued graduate studies in economics at the University of Utah and in instructional psychology and technology at the University of Utah. In 1989, he was formally accredited as a Japanese-to-English translator by the American Translators Association. His translations have appeared in such academic journals as Japanese Economic Studies, and he has delivered scholarly papers before such groups as the Association for Asian Studies.

He is currently a volunteer on-line instructor of Japanese for BYU-Idaho and a volunteer on-line Japanese-to-English translator for the Tokyo, Japan, Public Affairs office of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Mark Riddle and his wife, Laurel Backman Riddle—an attorney practicing in both Utah and Washington and specializing in estate planning (wills, trusts, probate) and asset protection—live in Pleasant Grove, Utah.

Posted June 2010

As I reflect on my witness of the gospel and church of Jesus Christ, I find it anchored in one of several spiritual gifts spoken of in the Book of Mormon, that of “an exceedingly great faith.”¹ I assume that we are, for the most part, to live on this earth by faith, for, as the apostle Paul wrote, “whilst we are at home in the body, … we walk by faith, not by sight.”² To live essentially by faith while striving for improvement in one’s love and obedience to God and His creation is to pursue that incomprehensibly distant goal of perfection, of which the Savior spoke in the Sermon on the Mount.³ It may be that the spiritually most devout and resilient among us will live out their lives almost entirely by faith, rather than by sight. Generally, for them, observation, experience, and the acquisition of knowledge during earthly life broaden and deepen faith, without replacing it with sure knowledge. For most of us lacking incontrovertible knowledge, confusion, perplexity, and doubt at times will compel us to “circle the wagons” around our faith in a determined self-defense.

For the most part, we who, nevertheless, are striving to improve in even small increments will experience relatively infrequent and ineffable confirmations that our faith is well-placed. These typically brief but sustaining moments lift us beyond faith toward the doorstep into sure knowledge. As they occur, one’s faith is buttressed with a more certain confidence and assurance. One’s humble faith on such occasions melds for the moment with something approaching a knowledge of Truth.

During my life, there has been a small number of such affirming occurrences. While normally I would not share such events with a public audience, nevertheless, when speaking to fellow searchers after Truth, I consider it appropriate to make an exception. First, however, I emphasize my assumption that in the economy of Heaven it may well have been preferable for me to be content with a life devoted to strengthening my faith and to service of my fellow man, rather than seeking surer knowledge beyond faith. Nevertheless, at the time of this witness, I felt that my need for divine confirmation was a surpassing consideration.

This occurrence was not the result of or prevented by mental or spiritual acuity. It seems to have been an expression of grace for me—at the moment, an especially inadequate and suffering soul. I had found myself assigned to administer a rather significant church entity in a foreign land where I was responsible for the spiritual well being of a considerable number of Latter-day Saint (Mormon) members. My almost numbing concern for them was combined with a tormenting worry about an adult member of my own immediate family whom I had left behind in the USA. My prayers for greater wisdom and strength to appropriately address the needs of those who had a claim on me for guidance were sincere and frequent—and, it seemed for a considerable time, unanswered.

And yet, a blessing did come. Early one morning as I was driving to my office while again pondering my seemingly overwhelming challenges, I suddenly “saw” or perceived what I assume was akin to a vision. It must have lasted only a few seconds, if that, for I continued to drive in traffic without accident. As it were, I saw clearly in the sky above my head two long, slightly wavy, but (at least at the beginning) distinct lines of people standing one behind another. I immediately recognized in the front of their respective lines my deceased grandparents, uncles, and a cousin. I did not have time or sufficient presence of mind to look carefully at the faces of others, but I sensed that the lines stretching, it appeared, into infinity were made up of my departed relatives, beginning with the more recently deceased and extending back through ages of time. I perceived that these people all were looking at me with warmth, compassion, and encouragement, as though assuring me of their pledge of support.

Arriving at my office, I wrote this experience down in as much detail as I could recall, and I pondered the meaning of this, for me, highly unusual occurrence. As I did so, I fairly soon recalled a verse from one of our Latter-day Saint scriptures complementing the Bible which contains a promise from the Lord to all who are willing, even though barely able, to serve Him as His humble messengers: “I will be on your right hand and on your left, and my Spirit shall be in your hearts, and mine angels round about you, to bear you up.”⁴ At that moment it all felt so reasonable to me: Who of His angels would more willingly and with greater purpose bear me up than those of my own ancestors? This glimpse into eternity provided me with a feeling of greatly needed reassurance, peace, and confidence.

I have said that in my life these extraordinarily remarkable “tender mercies” are not frequent, but quieter feelings of inspiration, prompting, and confirmation do occur at irregular and unpredictable times. Taken together, they provide me with a sufficient and warm blanket of assurance, but without destroying a basic premise and condition of our earthly existence, that we primarily live not by sight but by faith “whilst we are absent from the Lord.”⁵

Notes:
¹ Moroni 10:11.
² 2 Corinthians 5:6-7.
³ Matthew 5:47.
⁴ Doctrine and Covenants 84:88.
⁵ 2 Corinthians 5:5-7.

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Gary L. Browning was born in 1940 in Idaho Falls, Idaho. He served an LDS mission to Finland between 1960 and 1963 and presided over the first LDS mission in the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1993. He currently serves as a patriarch to Russian-speaking members of the Church.

Professor Browning earned degrees in Slavic languages and literatures from Brigham Young University (B.A.), Syracuse University (M.A.) and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1974). After serving as a teaching fellow at Harvard, he taught as an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, and then at BYU as an assistant, associate, and full professor. While at BYU, he also served two terms as chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages, as a member and then as chair of the Faculty Advisory Council, as University Honors Program director, and then as first dean of University Honors Education. He received the Alcuin General Education Fellowship, the Karl G. Maeser General Education Fellowship, and the Eliza R. Snow Fellowship.

Professor Browning has published books on the life and art of Boris Pilnyak, leveraging one’s knowledge of Russian through roots and affixes, and Russia and the Restored Gospel, and edited a special number of BYU Studies in the interest of peace. A volume on symbolism and allegory in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is now at press.

Posted June 2010

Since joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in February 1979, my testimony has grown a lot more. I was initially very impressed by Joseph Smith’s testimony. His search for the truth and the findings that he came up with ended the need for me to search further for the truth. I did not need to “re-invent the wheel.”

Following those early days of my introduction to the testimony of Joseph Smith I have had time to look more closely at his contribution to the scriptures and the information that God has spoken to several people in many places over the earth spanning all the centuries of these several dispensations of time since Adam. I have been influenced to be like Abraham when he became aware, and convinced, that God practically walked with him and had his hand in everything that happened to Abraham. In his much excitement and appreciation of God, Abraham said, “Thy servant has sought thee earnestly; now I have found thee” (Abraham 2:12, 13).

Joseph Smith’s contribution to the scriptures has brought to light records that were hidden since Adam, which records contained God’s communication with his prophets in various places and various dispensations. These records contained details of the works that God had made by his hands. The Bible, indeed, does not contain these accounts. God has said, “Wherefore, because that ye have a Bible ye need not suppose that it contains all of my words; neither need ye suppose I have not caused more to be written” (2 Nephi 29:10).

Genesis chapters 1 and 2 tell about the creation. The Book of Moses chapters 2 and 3, and also The Book of Abraham chapters 4 and 5, both in the Pearl of Great Price, relate the account of the creation. These are additions to the scriptures through the ministry of Joseph Smith. Again, in Doctrine and Covenants 29:30-32 further revelations to Joseph Smith himself bear witness of the truth of spiritual creation before physical creation as it is vividly stated in the Pearl of Great Price. Without very close examination of these accounts, one may not easily find the precise meaning of the accounts as they are presented to mankind. I believe that, as this information is coming to us from one source only—the Almighty God who created all things, who spoke separately to Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and Moses, in their various dispensations and locations—we must collate them into one continuous coherent flow with clearer meaning and easy understanding.

God has said, “For I command all men, both in the east and in the west, and in the north, and in the south, and in the islands of the sea, that they shall write the words which I speak unto them; wherefore I speak the same words unto one nation like unto another. And when the two nations shall run together the testimonies of the two nations shall run together also. The testimony of two nations is a witness unto you that I am God” (2 Nephi 24:8). In this our dispensation, which is the dispensation of the fullness of time, the Prophet Joseph Smith is at the head. Evidently he has been commissioned to restore all things. As many as will believe, will embrace the restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ. Messages that God wanted to be written in various places to be brought together have been brought together.

Nephi was told, “Behold, these things shall be hid up, to come forth unto the Gentiles, by the gift and power of the Lamb, and in them shall be written my gospel, saith the Lamb and my rock and my salvation” (1 Nephi 13:35-36). Moses was told, “Behold, I will raise up another like unto thee; and they shall be had again among the children of men among as many as shall believe” (Moses 1:41 and Deuteronomy 18:18). I testify that Joseph Smith is that prophet of the restoration of the fullness of the gospel. We must do everything to understand and heed the restoration that has come through him. I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior and Redeemer. Amen.

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Emmanuel Abu Kissi studied medicine in England and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints while completing training in surgery in London, in 1979. After his return to Ghana, Dr. Kissi and his wife Elizabeth, who is a nurse, established a medical clinic in Accra, which they named Deseret Hospital. He also served as a professor at Legon University Medical School and as a general surgeon at Korle Bu Hospital.

In the Church, he has served as a branch and district president, president of the Ghana Accra Mission, patriarch of the Accra Ghana Lartebiokorshie Stake, and, from 2002 to 2007, as an area authority. When, in June 1989, the then-government of Ghana suspended all meetings of the Church and expelled all foreign church representatives, Dr. Kissi was designated the official head of the Church in Ghana, a position he held until “The Freeze” was over in November 1990. He has worked intensively to increase interfaith relationships in Ghana.

He is the author of Walking in the Sand: A History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ghana (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2004) and of “Book of Mormon Principles: Our Eternal Choices,” Ensign (February 2004).

Posted June 2010

There is a living God, Jesus Christ was and is His literal Son, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints truly is Christ’s church. I received this testimony by studying the Holy Bible and the Book of Mormon, practicing the teachings found therein, fasting, and sincerely praying to know the truth. I have witnessed first-hand dozens of others gain a testimony by following these simple steps and echo the promises made by prophets throughout the ages, that all who study the gospel of Jesus Christ as taught in the Holy Bible and the Book of Mormon, practice the teachings therein, fast and pray to know the truth with sincerity of heart will receive the same witness.

I was born a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and, for a while, believed because of my parents’ teachings. As a teenager I became more serious about life and the prospects of serving as a missionary. In good conscience I could not declare The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be the only true church on the earth unless I knew it for myself. I focused my study on the Book of Mormon and prayed sincerely to have a witness from God if the Book of Mormon and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were true. Several times during those few months I fasted and, finally, the answer came as a calm, but strong, reassuring feeling that I could not deny. Since that time I have received many answers to prayers and witnessed many miracles performed in the name of Jesus Christ and through the power of His priesthood. In addition, I have seen miracles in the lives of others through faith on the Lord Jesus Christ and the administration of His priesthood. Miracles abound among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints just as they were recorded during our Savior’s mortal ministry. They are not publicly broadcast because they are sacred gifts from God to those who have faith and are willing to accept His will.

As a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana, I met professors who held the view that religion was for those of weak minds. Their opinion was that religion was a crutch used by people with little understanding of science. I pondered those ideas in light of my personal experiences and concluded that such arrogance was not becoming a true scientist. A true scientist would search for the truth regardless where the search may lead. A true scientist would acknowledge that there are discoveries yet to be made and would have an open and inquiring mind. Just as foolish people of centuries past denied the existence of bacteria they could not see with their naked eye, foolish people today deny the existence of a God they cannot capture within their limited grasp. As a microscope can reveal the existence of bacteria, faith and prayer can reveal the existence of a supreme being. Yet many today, as in times of old, deny the power of things they cannot see and do not understand. I concluded that the truly wise scientist readily accepts the existence of a God and acknowledges that no necessary conflict exists between science and true religion. To reject a supreme being is the pinnacle of arrogance.

In summary, I know that God, our Heavenly Father, created this earth through His Son, Jesus Christ. He has a marvelous plan for us, his children, to return to Him. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is Christ’s church, restored to the earth through the prophet Joseph Smith. It is the only true church on the earth with the power of the holy priesthood. The same organization, faith, and miracles exist in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as existed in the church Christ established two thousand years ago. The Book of Mormon is a book of scripture recorded by prophets to teach us of our Savior and to invite all to come unto Christ. I add my invitation to all who read this testimony to read the Book of Mormon and sincerely pray to know if it is true, and I leave my promise, in the name of Jesus Christ, that the truth of this book will be manifest by the power of the Holy Ghost.

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Stanley Earl Jenne, Ph.D., CPA, CFE, was born and raised in Ogden, Utah, the son of a zoology professor and the second of eight children. He has been married thirty-six years, and has four children and six grandchildren. His hobbies and interests include photography, snow skiing, and fishing. Professor Jenne received a Ph.D. in accountancy from the University of Illinois at Urbana (1982) after earning an M.S. from Colorado State University (1977) and a B.S. from Weber State University (1976). He is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and a Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE). Currently he is employed as a professor of accounting at Utah Valley University, where he previously held the position of Dean of the Woodbury School of Business. Professor Jenne has held tenured faculty positions and served a term as department chair at each of the following universities: The University of Montana, Illinois State University, and Weber State University. His research has been published in many respected accounting journals including the Journal of Accounting Literature, Accounting Horizons, Issues in Accounting Education, Journal of Accountancy, Internal Auditor, National Public Accountant, and The Practicing CPA. His accounting experience includes independent auditing with Grant Thornton as a faculty fellow, internal auditing at the Internal Revenue Service, and private consulting. Professor Jenne was one of the organizers of a community bank in Montana, where he continues to serve as a member of the board of directors and chair of the audit committee.

Posted June 2010

The idea of an intimately caring, personal, and concerned God that we are raised with as Mormons is an idea that I always liked. Although there have been times when I have not liked my particular set of circumstances, the answered prayers, the feelings of love and encouragement, the guidance, and especially the non-stop nudging to do better have simply welded this notion of God in my mind so that I can’t even remember the last time I entertained the notion of there being no God. I don’t know if that’s deemed properly intellectual, but my outlook is thoroughly based on the myriad of ways that I experience God daily.

My academic path has thus been a deeply spiritual journey of relying on God’s guidance and trying to follow His will. I was not a stellar undergraduate but felt that I should pursue history, which I’m sure that most of my professors would have told me was very much a leap of faith. But I kept at it, encouraged by continual promptings. I remember having a conversation with my wife’s aunt (not LDS but very religious) while I was anxiously awaiting word back from graduate schools about my applications. “You know it’s all in God’s hands,” she told me. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” I responded. “God has had a tendency to want to build my character.”

I got that one right; it was many more years before I was accepted into a PhD program. I got a master’s in history in the meantime but then found myself in Sacramento for three years still trying to get in, while any rational explanation for what I was doing was wearing thin. In fact, I got into a program the second year but had a strong feeling that it was not the “right” program and turned them down (a pretty grueling experience that really upset my mother). The next year I felt that it was okay to accept their offer and then had the profound experience of seeing the way that things had come together for me at that time: the right adviser (she’d just moved over from another school), the right sub-program (they had just created it), and a number of other factors. One of the most important things has been my wife’s professional development during our time in Sacramento. Her teaching job in Sacramento allowed her to get her current job that pays well and allows her to work from home (with some travel). This is something we really didn’t plan at all but her job has been really helpful for our family and she is able to do really neat things in education. We’re not sure where this all will lead but I now understand Pres. Packer’s statements about how the spirit will lead you when you are only able to see a step or two ahead and how at times we must take steps in the dark.

I’ve also felt strongly prompted in the things I study. I always loved history and found myself interested in the cultural background of the Restoration. That is, how did God prepare the world for the Restoration? Thus I was always interested in finding visionary or radical thinkers in the centuries preceding Mormonism who taught Mormon-looking ideas. Yet I soon found this curiosity to be a challenge when I found ideas that I thought to be distinctly Mormon close enough to Joseph Smith’s environment to have influenced him. Finding such items made me uncomfortable and I knew that Mormon opponents would use such things to argue against the visionary nature of the Prophet’s teachings. At the time I didn’t see the irony that, as I was actively looking for such parallels, I should not have been so surprised to find some.

While I was sorting through this paradox that I had put myself in, a good friend of mine lost his faith in the Church and wanted to talk about it in a very assertive way. Most conversations quickly turned to the latest he had heard. I would try to parry his remarks with pieces of apologia that I had heard but I soon found that all he had to do was to express doubt about these “proofs” to make me quite uncomfortable. Were the proofs really watertight? I had gotten far enough along in my graduate work to know that most claims of scholars were open for debate. How helpful was it to rely on human wisdom? Not very, I was finding. How could I resolve these concerns? I could devote my life to studying areas of debate like biblical studies or Mesoamerica, but that wasn’t really my interest. And besides, if I really approached the topic in an open-minded way, how did I know that the data would bear out my beliefs? As I was stewing over this, I felt God interject and say that I could ask Him, but I hadn’t found that to be the weapon of choice when contending with my friend.

In time I realized that there was no way to look at the data concerning Mormonism’s validity objectively. Everyone would take certain presuppositions to the data and weigh and highlight the data accordingly. It became very clear to me that ultimately one either chose to believe or chose not to. Certainly there were considerable amounts of striking issues in Mormonism’s favor, but the data could not resolve every concern. I decided to take God’s advice and rely on Him. As I did, I quickly found I had no need to fight with my friend over anything and he soon found me a rather unperturbed sparing partner giving a lot of “so what” responses to his latest barbs.

This realization also helped to resolve my concern over parallels. I didn’t need to prove or worry about Mormonism’s validity. Whatever means God used to facilitate the Restoration was fine. Believers who saw a providential history of God preparing the way for the Restoration and critics who saw environmental parallels as undercutting these claims were actually talking about the same thing, I decided. One saw God’s hand; one didn’t. But they were talking about the same process: how Mormonism came about. Again, I felt no need to try to get the facts to compel one viewpoint or another. We choose what we believe.

So now I very much enjoy my work of looking at how the larger society was prepared to accept Mormonism, or what was the cultural background out of which Mormonism developed. To me, it is the same question and I know that God prepared the way for me to study this topic under ideal circumstances (my personal failings being the one setback, but God keeps working with me).

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Stephen Fleming received his BA in history at BYU and his Masters at California State University, Stanislaus. He is currently working on his PhD in religious studies at UC Santa Barbara. He has published in BYU Studies, Mormon Historical Studies, New Jersey History, Religion and American Culture, Church History, and Max Weber Studies. His wife, Lee, is the senior school development coach for the New Tech Network. Together they have four children.

Posted June 2010

Christmas of my senior year, I married my Stanford sweetheart, Susan Buhler. This was also a time for waking up spiritually. I was raised in an academic family and carefully taught that religion was all right for those who needed it, but that there was no eternal truth to it. As I came to know the reality of the teaching that comes by the Spirit and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I began the greatest adventure that there is in this life.

Academic life took us to New York City for four years of graduate school, then Madison, Wisconsin, then Tennessee for seven years (where I taught at Vanderbilt), and finally to our current home in Newark, where I teach organic chemistry at the University of Delaware. I have published nearly 200 papers on natural product total synthesis and the development of new synthetic methods, and I have written several books. For any readers so inclined, my weekly online update of the best of organic synthesis can be found by googling “organic highlights”.

Susan earned a Ph.D. in curriculum development from the University of Delaware, and built an academic career at Rowan University, teaching prospective elementary school teachers to do, enjoy, and teach mathematics.

Along the way we raised six children, which has been the most fun of all. They are married, and we are on to the third generation, with twelve grandchildren so far.

We had a grand time with the next phase of life, enjoying being a honeymoon couple again. For those of you who are not familiar with the East Coast, Delaware is a small state near Philadelphia. We had season tickets to the Philadelphia Orchestra, savoring the music and the dinners before with our friends. We spent weeks together in Nara, in Delhi, in Florence, and also in Guangzhou, China, where we were visiting professors together.

Six years ago, Susan was diagnosed with breast cancer. After surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, she enjoyed several vigorous years, but two years ago it came back, and she passed away on January 20, 2010. Dedicated to her students, she managed to keep teaching through the end of October. We spent more than forty years learning to be one, and that one is not gone. We are just apart for a time.

When I was baptized, I had glimpsed the strength and power of the Gospel and wanted it in my life. With more than forty years of experience living it, including four years as bishop of our ward, I know that strength and power personally. I am looking forward to the years ahead.

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Douglass F. Taber (Ph.D., Columbia University) is a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Delaware, with specialization in organic chemistry. His home page is at http://valhalla.chem.udel.edu.

Posted June 2010

I grew up in a very small branch of the Church in Redcliffe, Queensland, Australia. I received a testimony of a living, loving God at a young age. The event was very simple, and yet it has had a power impact upon my life ever since. I was about eight or nine years of age when, for Christmas, my family bought me a little dog, which I named Tinker. We had had dogs before, but this was the first dog that was mine. I loved him dearly. Every morning, when Dad would open the back door, I would hear him running down the hall, then he would jump up onto my bed and lick me to death, telling me it was time to get up. Every day when I came home from school he was there waiting for me, so excited that I had come home.

One Tuesday when I came he wasn’t there. That seemed very strange to me. When I went to call him for his dinner, he didn’t come. That was even more strange. I called and called, and went searching the neighborhood, but to no avail. That night, as I kneeled to pray, I asked Heavenly Father to help me find my dog—it was a very simple child’s prayer. The next morning my Dad opened the back door, but there were no sounds in the hallway and no licks to wake me up. When I came home from school, again he wasn’t there. For three nights I went to bed not knowing where Tinker was, each night praying that Heavenly Father would help me find Tinker.

On the Friday, after school, I didn’t go home. Instead, I took the bus straight to the church for Primary. I always arrived before everyone else, and was around the back of the church, sitting in the shade, waiting for the others to come. I heard cars arriving and one of my friends came looking for me. She asked if it was my dog sitting on the front step of the church. I ran around the front and there was Tinker sitting on the step waiting for me. I was so excited to see him. How had Tinker known to come to the church? We lived over a mile away and we had never taken him to it, and yet there he was. Heavenly Father had answered my prayer. On that day, I knew that God was real, that he lived, and that he was interested even in a kid who had lost her dog.

In many ways, life is a lot more complicated now than it was on that day. I went to the University of Queensland and earned a bachelor’s degree in physiotherapy and worked for a number of years as a therapist. In 1985, my friend and I went backpacking around the world and we went to Israel, where the scriptures came alive for me in a very real way as I visited some of the biblical sites. I went back to Israel in 1987 as a part of the Brigham Young University Jerusalem Center and studied there for a semester. This was my first in-depth study of the Bible. I loved it! I loved learning the history, the language, the culture, and the politics. For the first time I was introduced to some of the difficult questions about the Bible, but I was introduced to them with a hermeneutics of faith, rather than a hermeneutics of suspicion.

I came home from Israel and served a mission to the Australia Melbourne Mission and then, because I was so fascinated by what I had learned in Israel, I decided to attend BYU in Provo. I earned a BA and MA in Near Eastern Studies and then went to the Claremont Graduate University and earned a PhD in Religion, majoring in New Testament. Frankly, I was nervous about getting a PhD. I knew that I would no longer be in a “safe” religious environment. The best piece of advice I received was to always remember that everyone brings assumptions to the table when studying religion. Those who have faith bring assumptions to the text, but so do those who espouse a purely academic approach. While in graduate school I had to learn the academic approach, but I realized that I didn’t have to accept all of their assumptions—that there is no God, there are no such things as miracles, that prophecy does not exist, and that Jesus never considered himself to be the Son of God. Nevertheless, one of the most valuable things that I learned from graduate school was the questions that scholars ask of the text. Their questions fascinated me. But because my assumptions were not the same as theirs, I often came away with different answers, and that process has been invaluable.

Today, my knowledge that God lives is very different in many ways than it was as a young child when I found my dog, Tinker, on the front step of our Church. My study of the Bible has deepened and enriched—both intellectually and, more importantly, spiritually—my knowledge that God lives.

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Born and raised in Australia, Gaye Strathearn received her Ph.D. from the Claremont Graduate University in California. As a professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University and a specialist on the New Testament and Christian origins, she teaches courses on both the New Testament and the Book of Mormon. In particular, her research focuses on the bridal chamber ritual in Gnosticism, the life and teachings of the apostle Paul, and the gospel of Matthew.

Posted June 2010