A really long post about DOCTRINE

 What is doctrine and how is it established? I have some thoughts beyond these two questions, but first, I want us to start on the same basic understanding. 

In his book, Increase in Learning, Elder David A. Bednar distinguishes doctrine from principles and applications. This isn’t the first or last entry for the word Doctrine into Latter-day Saint vernacular, but I think it defines the basics of how Latter-day Saints typically view Doctrine in as fair a light as possible. Here’s the statement: 

A gospel doctrine is a truth—a truth of salvation revealed by a loving Heavenly Father. Gospel doctrines are eternal, do not change, and pertain to the eternal progression and exaltation of Heavenly Father’s sons and daughters. Doctrines such as the nature of the Godhead, the plan of happiness, and the Atonement of Jesus Christ are foundational, fundamental, and comprehensive. The core doctrines of the gospel of Jesus Christ are relatively few in number (pp. 151–152).

In the October 2019 General Conference, President Dallin H. Oaks reiterated the words of Elder Neil L. Andersen to define how doctrine is established in the church. Here’s that statement: 

The doctrine is taught by all 15 members of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve. It is not hidden in an obscure paragraph of one talk.” The family proclamation, signed by all 15 prophets, seers, and revelators, is a wonderful illustration of that principle.

Another, more rigorous, standard for establishing church doctrine can be seen in the way the church has traditionally accepted new writings into its scriptural canon. As seen most clearly in the process described in Official Declaration 2, this process of establishing church doctrine is not just that something is taught by all 15 members of the First presidency and Quorum of the Twelve, but that it is formally sustained by those bodies, other general authorities, and by the common consent of the church at large. 

In the case of Official Declaration 2, new doctrine was only added to the church’s official canon after what you can read about at the end of Official Declaration 2 in your scriptures: 

Recognizing Spencer W. Kimball as the prophet, seer, and revelator, and president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it is proposed that we as a constituent assembly accept this revelation as the word and will of the Lord. All in favor please signify by raising your right hand. Any opposed by the same sign.

The vote to sustain the foregoing motion was unanimous in the affirmative.

I think I mostly agree with podcast host and Latter-day Saint theologian James C. Jones in upholding this standard of acceptance “by common consent” for establishing official church doctrine. However, this standard has definitely been de-emphasized in favor of the less-rigorous standard Elder Andersen and President Oaks describe, and I think most members of the church are likely to accept their definition. I think as a concession, I’m happy to accept the common consent process as the process by which the scriptural canon is established, and I allow for a distinction between the concept of canon and the concept of doctrine. After all, no church survives theologically on its scriptural canon alone. Scripture plus inspired tradition establishes doctrine in every other church, so it should not be surprising that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the same–a key distinguisher being that we level-up our concept of inspired tradition by viewing our tradition setters as prophets, seers, and revelators. 

Let’s review. 

Doctrine is

• Truth revealed 

• Unchanging

• Significant to the eternal destiny of humanity

Doctrine in the church is established  by the unified teaching First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve. 

But I want to comment on a few things in these standard understandings that I think are important. 

The difference between doctrine and truth

I want you to notice what’s between the word “truth” and the word “revealed” above. Don’t overthink it. It’s a space! And I think that space is important. Truth is truth. I do believe it is unchanging, universal. But doctrine is the truth as it is REVEALED. And revelation always comes through a human revelator. How truth gets to us is necessarily through an imperfect vessel of another human being. 

In fact, doctrine, in my opinion, isn’t just “truth revealed,” it is “truth revealed, interpreted, and understood,” with layers of revelation, interpretation, and individual understanding pressed and baked together like a buttery croissant. 

That actually brings me to the issues I have with the way we talk about doctrine in the church and how I think we should start thinking about it differently. 

Doctrine can change. It has changed. Actually, I’d say that the restoration itself is fundamentally a changing of doctrine. The Book of Mormon and other revelations of Joseph Smith not only add to the Bible, but reshape it. 

If you are a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, maybe putting it this way will help: Doctrine reveals eternal truth line upon line, precept upon precept. It corrects the theological understandings of the past. It shifts the way we’ve understood doctrine before. And I think we need to be open to the possibility that the way we currently understand eternal truth, through revelation, could be wrong, and future revelation will (not change doctrine, maybe, but) change the way we understand doctrine as it was revealed previously until all truth is circumscribed into one great whole. 

When President Russel M. Nelson says that the restoration is ongoing, I hope he doesn’t mean just that we’re going to get some new policies and restructured rituals. I hope he means that we still “believe that God will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the kingdom of God.” Take your vitamin pills you myopic fools! And loosen the grip you have on what you think is immovable “Doctrine.” 

Imagine that eternal truth is an enormous quilt that contains all possible knowledge. God has this original quilt (maybe on Kolob 🙂) and its pattern. He reveals the pattern for the quilt to humanity line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little, throughout the course of history. For some sections of the quilt, people deduce what it probably looks like without direct revelation from God. For other sections, there are great disputes about all sorts of aspects of what the quilt should look like. Some people have published authoritative patterns, sometimes claiming to be the whole quilt, sometimes only parts. Honestly, everyone has their own quilt that they’ve made from the bits of the pattern that they’ve collected from others or deduced themselves. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a large quilt pattern that they claim was revealed to them directly by God, and they believe that more lines of the pattern will yet be revealed and incorporated into the pattern that members of the church can follow in constructing their own quilts. 

I think the view that seems to be taught by Elders Bednar, Andersen, and Oaks is that we will get new squares to add to the quilt, but squares that have been added to the quilt by the 15 men at the top of the church will never be removed or changed. But I think that’s wrong. I think prophets experience the divine, and report what they genuinely feel is right. But I don’t think they hear the divine pattern with 100% accuracy. I actually think depending on personal and societal biases, there can be times when the gentle whisper of the divine pattern is dramatically misheard. 

Why do I believe that the Quorum of the 15 are not simply scribes dictating the word of God when they establish doctrine, but are instead interpreters of faint whispers affected by personal biases in meaningful–might be wrong about core-core doctrine–ways? Let me outline some reasons. 

The Q15 definition itself

If a prophet receives clear revelation directly from God, and transmits it verbatim to the world, then why is the standard for establishing doctrine through 15 people? The answer, I think it’s easy to agree, is that it is less likely that a revelation is false if it is independently attested to by multiple witnesses. This is in line with the law of witnesses found in 2 Corinthians 13:1. It’s also the principle between trial by jury in the United States where jurors must find unanimity in order to convict the accused. Multiple witnesses control for bias–at least in theory. Importantly, though, the need for multiple attestation admits the existence of bias. And, I would argue, it magnifies bias when all the witnesses share common characteristics. 

Of course, we could be dealing with something quite different from a decision by jury when it comes to the establishment of doctrine by prophets in unity. For example, it could be that all of the apostles and first presidency members take a collective nap and dream the exact same revelatory dream, then they compare notes, and the dreams that are, in fact, exact become doctrine. Or they could all take up pens and, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, could write a revelation and compare drafts. If they all write the same thing, that would be an impressive test to determine if they are all receiving revelation in unity. 

But I suspect it’s not like that. For one, I think they would tell us if they received revelation that way. For two, the format of prophetic wisdom is quite different from what it was anciently, or during Joseph Smith’s presidency, or Joseph F. Smith’s. The First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles are not publishing revelations that they claim came directly from God. They don’t start anything with “thus saith the Lord.” Instead, they search the scriptures, they ponder, they pray, they discuss. They interpret existing canonical texts and sign on to each other’s interpretations. How do they decide if they truly can sustain what one general authority has said? They evaluate if it matches their understanding of theology. They check it against their own feelings. It might seem kind of rude to define it this way, but they make sure it is in line with their biases. If it’s not, they surely object in discussion, they explain why they have the bias they do, and they are either convinced out of their bias by another member (and the spirit), or they convince others that their bias is the correct way to bend a particular doctrinal teaching. 

The above paragraph is what I assume happens for things like the Family: A Proclamation to the World. For doctrine that is less easy to pin down–doctrine that individual members might piece together by analyzing what is emphasized by multiple members of the general authorities multiple times–I think it’s an even less rigorous process. One authority teaches something in General Conference. It resonates with another authority. They repeat it. This also controls for biases on which the General Authorities differ and amplifies biases which the General Authorities share, but both to a lesser extent. 

This is only one example of where I personally think established “doctrine” has possibly gone wrong, but I think it’s telling that one of the most prominent established doctrines in the church (that marriage between a man and a woman is the ONLY kind of marriage that is ordained of God) isn’t found anywhere in our scriptural canon, but it does align with the shared characteristics of the 15 straight married men who establish church doctrine today. 

The witness of scripture

In my study of the New Testament this year, one thing I’ve noticed is how the gospel message evolves over time. Jesus in the earliest gospel (Mark) is an apocalyptic preacher whose message is that the “kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He was either preparing his followers for the time when the Son of Man would come and establish the kingdom of God on earth, free from outside political influence, or claiming to be that Son of Man. By the time we get to John, the message is more spiritual in nature, it’s less about a coming earthly kingdom and more about an eternal reward. This is likely because enough time had passed without the apocalypse that the Johannine community that produced John felt the need to reinterpret rhetoric of an impending apocalypse to a more spiritualized understanding. 

This progression from an apocalyptic understanding of the gospel to a spiritualized, unearthly interpretation is even more evident in the writings of Paul and his impersonators. Paul was definitely an apocalypticist who believed that the second coming of Jesus would happen very soon–definitely in his lifetime. He railed against the other preachers who claimed that the resurrection had somehow happened already, and taught that there was a specific order of events that would shortly come to pass for God’s kingdom to be fully established (see 1 Corinthians). In the pseudo-pauline epistles Collossians, Ephesians, and 1 Timothy, impersonators of Paul have clearly seen the timeframe Paul expected for the apocalypse come and go, and they argue for interpretation of Jesus’s message in ways totally contrary to Paul: namely, that we are spiritually “raised” and live into the blessings of that kind of resurrection now. 

Now, 2000 years after the apocalyptic teaching of Jesus, I’m inclined to side more with the author of Ephesians than Paul (at least on the issue of the kind of transformation to expect). As an interpreter, I can interpret this multiple ways. Maybe the author of Ephesians was right, and his or her understanding of a spiritual resurrection is correct and there will be no ultimate apocalypse as Jesus and Paul taught. Maybe Jesus and Paul REALLY taught a spiritual resurrection and establishment of a spiritual kingdom, but their message was lost in transmission. Or maybe both ideas are correct, and Paul was only wrong or his message corrupted in timeframe; we can be raised from spiritual death every day through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, AND we will be resurrected from physical death at the second coming of Christ and the ringing in of the millennium (just thousands of years after Paul thought). 

I don’t think the manuscript evidence supports the conclusion that the original message of Paul and Jesus and the author of Ephesians were originally in perfect harmony. In fact, textual Bible scholars argue the opposite. I think the evidence suggests, rather, that revelation is messy, and it involves a lot of  logic, study, deep thinking, dialogue, correction, and spirit, and it’s through that all that we gain insight into capital-T Truth. But we see the truth revealed “through a glass darkly.” One dim revelation expands and changes another. And I see no reason to believe that it is different today. 

My own experience

Elder Bednar did a series of videos a few years ago called “Patterns of Light” where he described different levels of clarity in revelation. One level, he described with the analogy of a lightswitch turned on. Another level he described as a sunrise on a clear day. Both of these levels he called rare. 

The most common level of clarity in revelation Elder Bednar described as a gradual sunrise on a foggy day. He admits that this is a form of revelation common to his own experience. 

And even at my most spiritually active, this has been my experience. 

When I’ve received what I’ve called revelation in the past, it has come through the pattern described in D&C 8:2, that is, I have had a good feeling paired with a good thought. The strongest of these feeling/thought revelations have been simple signs of love from God. 

For example, I was once praying as part of a challenge to increase the power of my personal prayers and I felt like there was a hand on my shoulder and a voice in my mind saying “I love  you.” Another time I was screaming and crying at God after a tragedy and felt a wave of comfort paired with a thought that there is, in fact, an afterlife and a plan set by God for the happiness of his children. These two experiences are the most powerful spiritual manifestations I’ve ever had and were, for a long time, the cornerstones of my testimony. 

A level of revelation I’ve experienced a few steps removed from those strong spiritual manifestations is what is sometimes described in scripture as a “burning in the bosom” in response to a question, an idea, someone else’s testimony, or a meaningful experience. This is what I’ve experienced in response to prayers asking if the Book of Mormon is true and in response to teachings that have resonated with me, the temple, personal scripture study, sacred music, the beauty of nature, and connection to my family history. The most recent example of this level of revelation happened maybe a year or two ago. I was driving in circles around a parking lot and singing hymns to keep my boys calm while my wife was in a store. I was pondering something I’d read which claimed that the personal work of the gospel and the work of establishing Zion was the same great work. As my mind caught hold upon this thought, there was a feeling of expansion in my outer chest and a feeling of warmth in my inner chest. Then I had that kind of fuzzy, falling feeling you get when you gush a little bit in love over someone, like when my kids say something cute or when I catch my wife smiling at a book she’s reading. And I realized I really like the idea of Zion. It moves me. It is perhaps the concept I like most in the church. 

I don’t know if I would consider this next level of revelation lesser or greater than the previous two; in many ways, it’s actually the same kind, but I think it’s worth mentioning as a separate class of revelation because I think it most resembles what I’ve often imagined the process of revelation at the apostolic level is like. That is, that there have been times when I felt previous unspoken words had come to me. This has happened to me when I’ve given priesthood blessings, where I didn’t know what I was going to say or what God wanted for the receiver of the blessing, but then I spoke words of healing or counsel with confidence. As you can probably tell, I process a lot through writing, and I’ve experienced this kind of spiritual sensation while journaling or note taking too. I put pen to paper or hands to keyboard and write, and I feel like I don’t know what I’m going to write, and then with a bit of a bosom-burning feeling, I write something with confidence that represents something new and insightful to me personally. And I’ve had similar sensations while speaking. I’ve opened my mouth, “not knowing beforehand what [I] should say” and I had the feeling that God had filled me with words I’d not considered previously. At times, I’ve been quite dramatic about this kind of spiritual experience, but I actually think that it doesn’t necessarily depend on the Holy Ghost. I think the mind has a great capacity to translate unorganized thoughts into coherent words when we give it the chance to. I’m a technical trainer by profession, and I’ve had this sensation on many occasions in the secular classroom. There have been topics that I didn’t know how to convey to a particular class, but I’ve opened my mouth to try and while speaking, I've spontaneously spoken the right analogy or other rhetorical device to get the point across. Several historical figures have been given attribution for the question “how can I know what I think until I see what I say” and I think that’s a good description of what’s going on here. Writing and speaking are essential catalysts of thought, and sometimes you just don’t know that you have a coherent thought in you until you force yourself to spit it out. 

Of course, anyone is free to attribute free writing or free speaking that bears the weight of insight to the Holy Ghost, and while I don’t think I see it that way anymore, I can concede the point that it is revelatory, but it has never been an exact science for me, it has rarely been claimed as an exact science throughout history (Some of Joseph Smith’s revelations are notable exceptions). It has been frequently emphasized in the church that revelation must be checked by previously established teachings, the law of stewardship, and the revelatory experiences of others. It isn’t hard to acknowledge that textual revelation most often requires revision to reach its final form. 

Now, I am not an apostle. It’s surely possible that the level of revelation that apostles and prophets receive are degrees above what I have experienced. But I do think it’s notable that Elder Bednar claims the foggy day revelation level as common to his experience, and the other two levels rare. It has been taught that spiritual gifts are available freely to all, regardless of status in church hierarchy. That’s one of the things I like about the church. The very promise of the Book of Mormon at the core of our faith is that revelation can be confirmed by the witness of the Holy Ghost, the same conduit through which the Book of Mormon was received. It’s that witness that tells me that the doctrine of the church as defined by Elders Andersen and Oaks is revelation seen dimly, and while the truth it is based on may never change, I think it wise to be open to the possibility that established doctrine will change to fit the capital T Truth that doctrine is a filtered version of. 

An alternative framework for doctrine

So I think we should think of doctrine differently than Elders Bednar, Oaks, and Andersen have outlined it, which yes, means that the doctrine of doctrine, defined by itself, is wrong. 

As the author John Green has written, “religion is a response to revelation,” and I think that the religion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has at its core modern revelations similar in power to the revelations at the core of other, older, religious traditions. But unlike with other religions, we are fewer steps removed from the revelations that give us our origin and the messy process through which revealed truth (which is itself filtered reality) is filtered, reinterpreted, grappled with, ritualized, and adopted. 

Truth is truth. It is universal and unchanging. 

The scriptural canon is the church’s authoritative teachings, adopted formally by common consent. These should be the core of our religious practice, but that doesn’t mean that even the scriptural canon is a verbatim copy of truth. It reveals truth through multiplicity, tradition, and interpretation, all of which create versions of truth that can be powerful but sometimes wrong. 

Doctrine is the church’s inspired traditional interpretations of truth, usually revealed through the canon. It is what the general authorities are most sure about when it comes to Truth. That doesn’t mean it can’t be wrong or be changed, but it does mean that the process of change relies on general leadership seeing past their biases for change to occur. 

I don’t think we’re under obligation to believe every doctrine or accept every claim in the canon. To bring back the quilt pattern analogy, I think one shortcut to understanding as much universal truth as possible is to adopt a canon and inspired tradition that has the benefit of voices beyond your own, especially tradition (established doctrine) that controls for bias and has withstood the test of time. I think the doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does pretty well on these measures, but I think it has work to do. And I think that as individuals, we necessarily have to decide what aspects of doctrine will be authoritative for us. 

I know this post is long, and I’m sorry, but I also want to mention some things that other churches have that we don’t, even though sometimes we act like we do. 

We don’t have any creeds which formalize our tradition into theological tests that define who is inside and who is outside the boundaries of our system of belief. We have the Articles of Faith, but these don’t function the same as the creeds do in Christianity at large. 

We don’t have confessions, which are more comprehensive statements of belief that clergy of some faiths must subscribe to to preach in their churches. 

I think the closest thing we have to creeds or confessions is the baptismal and temple interview questions. These are very limited in scope. 

We don’t have a doctrine of inerrancy of our scriptural canon. 

We don’t have a doctrine of infallibility for our leaders. 

And I’m glad we don’t have these things. It does make determining what to believe a bit harder, but I think it gives us a good shot at finding the truth for ourselves and living by it.