Are Christians Mormon?

For a hundred and fifty years the question has been repeatedly asked worldwide, “Are Mormons Christian?” We have struggled through the semantic tangles to answer that with an unqualified “yes.” In his heart every Mormon knows that this question is much like asking, “Is Hamlet Shakespearian?” It might be said, “After all, Hamlet is a manifestation of Shakespeare. In fact, Hamlet is Shakespeare.” Precisely. And so, the Mormon knows that Mormonism is the most vital twentieth century manifestation of Christ. Unlike Hamlet, it is alive. If it is less than that it is nothing.

Here the plan is to reverse the question and ask, “Are Christians Mormon?” This is not mere word play. In our time there are renowned and influential spokesmen and writers in all the major wings of Christendom—and they are not on the periphery but at the center—who are defending and teaching what, a century ago, Joseph Smith almost alone taught. For teaching it he, and his immediate heirs, gave their lives. No one of these spokesmen has pulled it all together, but there are pieces and fragments everywhere.

Before we outline these in a way that must be at best, a beginning, may I offer just four cautions:

First, tracing trends and movements and shifts is always a selective affair. Just as powerful as the movements I am going to chronicle are counter movements equally influential that could lead one to the conclusion that Christianity today has never been farther away from its original moorings. Moreover, those who have swung towards us have sometimes swung pendulum-like too far the other way.

Second, terminology is deceptive. Men may speak similarly but mean and feel differently. And, as you know, the theological vocabulary is notoriously vague.

Third, the focus on belief is misleading because religion is much more than belief—it involves values, commitments, kinds of loyalty, and cultures.

Finally, there is—as our missionaries more than anyone in the world may know—a tremendous chasm between what professional writers may say theologically, philosophically, and what actually penetrates to the grass roots. Between the theoretician and the layman there is an ocean.

But after those precautions, let us proceed with boldness.

The Nature of God

When the Boy Prophet emerged from the grove now called Sacred, he announced an unqualified testimony that God is a person. In doing so he offended the traditional sensitivities of every official Christian church. They had used the word “person”—and still do—but only in a most attenuated form, ascribing to the Eternal, consciousness, will, some kind of individuality, but denying the full-bodied characteristics of personality that we associate with the word.

Today that has remarkably changed. There are many who are saying that either the God of the Christian heritage is a person—a God like Jesus the Christ—or Christianity is simply false. Nels F. S. Ferre, for one, has said, “We must return to the categories of the New Testament and abandon the categories of the philosophers.”¹ Three recent articles have almost identical titles, “Is the God of the Philosophers the Same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?”² And their answer is “no”. Judah Halevi, Pascal, and Martin Buber, to name three recent philosophers, have said so.

A new interest in the question of whether we must delimit the word “being” and add the word “becoming” in our understanding of God is widespread.³ Having studied under two well-known theologians, I can report a like instinct in them. One, still alive, has written in summary, “The Mormons are right.” This is Charles Hartshorne of the University of Texas who has said that God is in some senses perfect but in other and important senses not; that there is yet process in God; that we must avoid, as Whitehead once said, “paying metaphysical compliments to God” which turn out to be insults.⁴

The other, dead, is Paul Tillich. And I happen to know, as few do, that shortly before his death, having written three volumes identifying God with “Being Itself,” with the Ground of Being, and denying all personal attributes, he keenly and tragically regretted it and fervently said, “If only I could do it over I would rewrite my book in terms of ‘Spirit.’”⁵ The next step would have been “person.”

Robert McAffee Brown,⁶ John Cobb, Jr., and many others are taking similar ground. We are no longer alone.⁷

Related to this is a comment of a prominent philosopher of education who has gone through, one by one, the traditional theistic categories like immutability, self-fulfilledness, absolute happiness, and then said, “I see no evidence in the scriptures nor any reasons discovered in logical analysis to believe that Jesus attributed any of these mythological traits to God.”⁸ Jesus spoke of God as “Father.”

The Nature of Man

Intertwined with this is the remarkable testimony we have struggled to bear as to the nature of man, the witness that there is something, even now, divine in mankind. This was offensive to anti-religionists and humanists for on their view man is much less than a superman and has only this life to work out his folly; offensive to the traditional Catholics because in their view there is a chasm between the nature of man and God and man only has dignity to the degree that he receives what they call “salvific grace.” It was offensive to Fundamentalists and Calvinists because in their view man is afflicted with pride and in the worst view utterly depraved—a worm. The doctrine has seemed even more out of step with the mental weather of our time, for national and world catastrophe in the last fifty years has so shaken our confidence in man, so undercut the foundations of assurance, that today nihilism is popular and it is as if writers have chosen up sides to see who can declare the most sophisticated despair.

Out of step with all this, we have gone on saying that these writers are not describing all of real life, but only life without God; not being honest, but only morbid; not being true to experience, but only to a projected face of experience; and not undercutting genuine faith in God, but only their disillusioned false faiths.

Today others are seeing man’s potential. Rufus Jones, the Quaker mystic, has written in nearly thirty books, “The old dualism must go”—the dualism that absolutely separates man and God.⁹ Henri Bergson closes his book, Two Sources of Religion and Mortality, saying, “The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.”¹⁰ Elton Trueblood has recently written, “Christianity is palatable not only because Jesus is like God, but because God is like Jesus.”¹¹ And so may man be.

The Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man cited evidence that the ultimate purpose undergirding even the cells and matter-in-motion of the cosmos is to produce Christs—Christogenesis, the emerging of a great and glorious personality.¹² Karl Rahner, certainly the most influential and also the most officially renowned Catholic theologian, has written, “It is not possible to speak theologically about God without at the same time saying something about man and vice versa.”¹³ Exactly.

Third, there was the claim that caused all to wince, of continual revelation. The Christian churches, in the absence of revelation, had tightened their views protectively, defensively, either around a holy man, the pope and hierarchy, or around a holy book, the Bible, which was alleged to be all-sufficient and only-sufficient. Religious knowing came only through that word and all other claims were treated as emotional extravagance.

Of Continual Revelation

Today it is different. Again the Quakers, George Fox, Rufus Jones, Elton Trueblood, speak (in these exact words) of continual revelation, by which they mean the cultivation of the inner light.¹⁴ And they have abandoned the more extreme forms of mysticism—its world-hating, its denying of the subject-object distinction, its plea that one day we may be, in a metaphysical sense, one with the Ultimate. Instead, they are talking very intimately about what we would mean by the present influence of the light of Christ.

Among the Catholics, theologian Avery Dulles (son of John Foster Dulles) has argued there cannot be a Christian church without prophets.¹⁵ Among the Protestants the traditional approach to mystery has slowly collapsed. Karl Barth had insisted that one could only speak dogmatically of what had been written;¹⁶ Bultmann, that one could speak only of its so-called existential impact,¹⁷ Emil Brunner, that a revelation comprehended would not be one,¹⁸ Martin Luther, that God is hidden (deus abs conditus);¹⁹ and the mystics, that God is known, if at all, “in a cloud of unknowing.”²⁰ Tillich likewise insisted that God is essential mystery not simply the not-yet-known, but an in-principle-unknowable. One comes away from the encounter with two things: (1) the knowledge that he has had the encounter with the mystery, and (2) that the mystery is mysterious.²¹

All that has changed.

There is new recognition that the word “mysteries” as it appears in the New Testament and in its background literature means something more, something one can reach through with knowledge or gnosis—not simply on the ground of faith (which was the Protestant claim), but with knowledge.²² All together more susceptible now to the claim of revelation, even the pope speaks frequently of it, uses the word, and prays for a restoration or renewal.”²³

It has been terrifying to men in charge of men’s souls to be so bereft. They now recognize that while damning prophets, they themselves have been cast in the role. For any man at any time to say, “If you will do so and so, you will be saved,” is to make prophecy. It is either true or false. And suddenly the recognition comes that Christ did not say there would be no prophets (that would have been a categorical way of enabling Christians to avoid deception). Instead he gave tests for distinguishing the true from the false.²⁴

Recently I attended a New Life Mission with a group of ministers who reported on their efforts to regain the young blood of various churches. “Brethren,” one of them said after the report (which was all negative), “we are supposed to be teaching good news. That is what the word ‘gospel’ means. Brethren, I wonder if we have any good news to preach!” When we left, a close Methodist friend of mine said, “You know, Madsen, I think I can write a book now. It will be titled The Gospel That Is Really Good News. It will be about you Mormons.” It is the essence of the trend to deny that no news is good news and to affirm that a living prophet would be a more reliable guide than a dead one.

The experience of the absence of revelation has led often to disillusion and a “sell out” to secularism, to quote Robert Fitch.²⁵ But there is now a new concern to let God speak, whatever he may say, even in condemnation.

That leads to the implicit insult in the Mormon witness, namely, that there has been an apostasy. We have offered to Christians, in a way, their own medicine. They have usually insisted that only when you come to recognize how sinful you are can you become receptive to the redemption. But while maintaining that man was totally sinful they yet believed that the church was invincible. Joseph Smith came to report not that the apostasy was evidence of the restoration but that the restoration was evidence of the apostasy.

It is as if a group had fallen off a sinking ship and a hundred individual dinghies were now around struggling for life and someone announced, “Let’s get together at least close enough to vote on which way is north.” And someone then said, “A ship is approaching.” One does not wisely cling to his raft when he can board a luxury liner. Yet many have preferred their rafts.

Today, we need no longer clamor about changes that have occurred since the ancient and primitive New Testament Church. Theologians themselves are saying it and saying it in agony. They are providing diagnosis and are hopefully more open to the Lord’s therapy.

Just in terms of factual almanacs the evidence is clear that the churches have declined in self-esteem, in status, in numbers, in financial support, and in what is now being called a “clergy shortage.” While population has expanded, church attendance has diminished.²⁶ And yet we can be grateful much is still alive, much is still productive.²⁷ (Joseph Smith did not condemn people; he condemned, in the name of God, certain suffocating creeds.)

Today many are saying of the original vitality in radical form, “it’s gone.” Dozens of articles speak of things “lost”—lost dimension, lost radiance, et al. The Paulist fathers of the Roman Catholic faith have been writing painfully about the “impasse” the church has reached.²⁸ Kierkegaard, a hundred years after his death, has become as influential as any living man. And he wrote ceaselessly that the church was “sick unto death”—not because he hated Christ, but because he loved him.²⁹ And to a similar degree, though from a different plateau, Nietzsche wrote, not against Christ as he appears in the New Testament, but against what he called the “burial” of Christ in the official doctrines.³⁰

When, ten years ago, the altogether brief and faddish movement, Christian Atheism, arose, Time magazine printed on their cover, “Is God Dead.”³¹ Our answer would have been: “The God of whom you speak was never alive.” The God of the creeds is an idolatric fiction (this is now being acknowledged widely) and as a result the church is sick—it is worse than sick, say some, it is dead. That tree, originally nourished by divinity, has become barren and unfruitful. What can be done? Well, they say, “the reformation continues” among the Protestants. But so also does the decline.³²

Of One Church

And this has given new status to the next staggering statement we made, that there ought to be one church. Time was when the churches rejoiced in diversity, when they said, we are enriched by our differences, when the standard approach to conflict was, God has taken account of all the individual traits of men and therefore does not require the same patterns for any set of men. All of us can speak for him and with him and by him. We need not worry.

No longer. Today there is the recognition in the ecumenical movement that the diversity of Christendom is not a compliment but a scandal.³³ There have been literal organizational reunions as the Congregational merger with the Evangelical Reform Church or the harmonizing of the United Church of Canada. There is talk of one American Protestant church numbering some twenty million that would bring together the larger segments of Protestantism.³⁴ The official Catholic hierarchy has tried to encourage dialogue—to agree to talk even if that talk does not yield agreement.³⁵ There has been a Federation or World Council of churches where at least policy decisions relating to universal world problems can be hammered out.³⁶

Henry Leiper has written, “Unless individual Christians become united first of all in the will to obey Christ’s command that they be one in love, then never will the sin of ecclesiastical disunity be overcome.”³⁷ To which we would add that until we are united under the power of God in his church we will not fully regain the power to love and be one. Thus comes the admission, all but universal, that radical disarray is division, is misreading of divine intent, is distortion of Christ’s prayer before Gethsemane that “they all may be one.”

Patterns of Revision

Out of this concern came Vatican II, the second Ecumenical Council for the Catholics. It is a standard joke (I meet it frequently talking to priests) that Pope John said, “Let us open the windows,” and that Pope Paul has been trying in vain to close them. Let’s just look at these three categories:

First, the abandonments that resulted from Vatican II: (1) The rejection of what had heretofore been sacred tradition. No longer is it sacred. The Aristotelian overlay, as it is called, the Thomistic (St. Thomas Aquinas) philosophicalizing of the Gospel tradition, is now rebuked in favor of a return to “Biblical theology.”³⁸ (2) Abandonment of many of the classical arguments for a purely rationalistic God, trying to find God at the end of a syllogism. As Gustave Weigel put it, “We must begin with the New Testament revelation of God and then connect him to the cosmos. We cannot do it the other way.”³⁹ (3) The rejection of the Roman curia that condemned all heretical books.⁴⁰ (4) The rejection of many of the traditional shrines and pilgrimages.⁴¹ (5) A toning down of Mariology.⁴² (6) An outright denial of Leo the XII’s exclusivistic claims that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church.⁴³

Second, what did they embrace? They embraced putting the mass in the vernacular.⁴⁴ Now there is a spate of articles which say the mass is not the original ceremony.⁴⁵

They embraced further involvement of the laity. There is an article saying that the Mormon missionary program which involves young laymen and laywomen is one hundred times more effective than others. That is an unhealthy ratio. They have revived, as they put it, the “deaconate.” What does that mean? It means that a layman—not an ordained and professional priest—can take the mass into homes.⁴⁶ More, they have reinterpreted the passage about anointing with oil in James. No longer is it last rites or extreme unction. Today they view it, close to the original, as administering to the sick. And Catholic “home teachers” for so they are, do that.⁴⁷ They’ve embraced “collegiality,”⁴⁸ which is another word for the counselor idea, presidencies, trinities of organization. They have embraced Abraham as the rock rather than, or in addition to, Peter.⁴⁹ And they have regained the idea of covenant and the notion of an ancient Israel of which the Church must be the modern expression.⁵⁰

Third, they are considering abandoning many other things. They have talked about the doctrine of the “real presence” in the Eucharist. Many progressive theologians favor an “analogical” presence doctrine.⁵¹ They have given up or are recommending giving up a strict reading of papal infallibility as in the writings of Hans Kuhn.⁵² They have outvoted the pope on the rights of divorce and birth control. Eight hundred American bishops simply said, “We do not accept what you have said.”⁵³ They are troubled by their heretofore venerated notion of natural law which is absolute, acknowledging that if there are such laws we do not fully know them.⁵⁴ One Catholic scholar has just written an article saying, “Farewell to the Original Sin.”⁵⁵ They are concerned about pedobaptism.⁵⁶ They are modifying certain forms of the classical view of hell and they are campaigning to abandon celibacy.⁵⁷ These are all steps toward the original revelations of Christ, ancient and modern.

Of Spiritual Gifts

And now the category of spiritual gifts. We insist on the part of the restoration that all of the gifts and blessings and powers that one can trace historically in the Book of Acts or trace as promises in the counsels of prophets, need to be central to the church or the church is no longer Christ’s. That has been met with the charge that these gifts ended with John the Revelator, that those who claimed face-to-face communion with God or spiritual charismatic gifts from Him were lunatics. First they claimed these gifts were absent, then unimportant, then undesirable, and finally, impossible.

But it is clear in our generation that as nature abhors a vacuum, a religious man cannot abide the absence of these gifts. Everything in the Book of Acts has been sought, often in counterfeit forms. There are prophetesses and soothsayers, clairvoyants and numerologists, astrologers and horoscopes, witch-cultivation, demon worship, dark rituals, death scenes, ouija boards, and mind-blowing drugs. Now among both Protestants and Catholics and even to a lesser extent among Orthodox Jews, the plea is that we must seek God’s way of feeling, God’s way of responding.

So there are what are called the underground church movements, the holiness movements, the cultivation of glossolalia or spontaneous speaking in tongues.⁵⁸ In Ann Arbor, for example, Protestants and Catholics meet together each week in a Catholic basilica to cultivate the gift of tongues and interpretation of tongues, the gift of healing, and the gift of prophecy.⁵⁹ “Faith-healing” has become almost big business in this country.⁶⁰ And the other gifts are no longer officially or unofficially claimed to be unessential. We can argue whether the phenomena are genuine or counterfeit. What we cannot argue is the thirst for them and the new recognition that they were anciently part and parcel of the church.

Of Sacred Marriage

That leads to the remarkable and somewhat strange teaching central from the beginning in the restoration that marriage is of God and that the traditional views disparaging the relationship of man and woman were not true to the Gospel but were a distortion, often through the unbiblical influence of the Greek distrust of matter.

One verse has been widely used against marriage in the New Testament and it can be used just as well as evidence for it. The question, you remember, was put by the Sadducees who were playing on the view that there could be marriage in heaven. The nub of their question was, “Which marriage will be binding.” Later, on the misreading of Paul and further the misleading of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, who placed celibacy above parenthood, Christendom came to frown somewhat on marriage.

We have rarely appealed to the glorious symbolism that Jesus himself used. He called himself the bridegroom. He hinted of the sacramental meal as the marriage feast, and likewise spoke of the eventual parousia—his great and glorious second coming, his descent in the clouds of heaven with his worthy hosts. Through symbolism he taught, we believe, that divine families encircled by his fire and light are the very essence of life and eternal life and that without them this earth—indeed this cosmos—will have missed the measure of its creation.

Today we are no longer alone. Spokesmen as varied as Mrs. Norman Vincent Peale,⁶¹ Presbyterian Peter Marshall (the man called Peter),⁶² atheist-become-Anglican C. S. Lewis,⁶³ the Swedenborgians,⁶⁴ reformation theologian John Dillenberger,⁶⁵ and a New Testament scholar named William E. Phipps,⁶⁶ have argued in effect that the separation of man and woman is the fall and that wickedness will persist until they are reunited.

In the new discovery of a Gospel of Philippians at Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt we read, according to R. Wilson,⁶⁷not only of the origin of mankind but the necessity for the reintegration of humanity by means of [listen] baptism, the sacrament, and sacred marriage.

We have (and this is only a footnote) spoken, oh so cautiously, of a heavenly mother. Traditional Christianity, following the Romans, has placed a mother in heaven. She has been, says the dogma, assumed bodily into heaven.⁶⁸ (And I said humorously to my friend, the Jesuit, “That’s exactly what she was—assumed into heaven.”) They have said that Mary, the mother of Christ, was in some ways co-redemptress with Christ and is the intimate Channel for out communion with the divine.⁶⁹ We do not want to follow that form. But we have from the beginning said there are two, there is God and Goddess, in the ultimate scheme of things.

And today? Well, again Tillich speaks in lamentation about what he called the “intolerable male character” of Protestant symbolism.⁷⁰ Too often, too much, the Christian had spoken only the pronoun “he” and there needed to be somehow—and he had no recommendation on how—the recognition of “she” and “they,” that is both male and female. But multiplying metaphysical mirrors does not increase the light. It remained for the restoration to clarify this. Today too many refuse, because guilt and terror yield slowly, the recognition that marriage is of God in some eternal sense.

The Document Explosion

Now let me be even more rapid in a kind of summary. These changes have come about under pressure—not only ours, but the pressures of the real world. But something else is happening that is bringing about this revolution. And it is happening almost under our noses and without our notice. It is the revolution caused by the uncovering and recovering of ancient documents. Since 1947 over one hundred thousand documents have come to light which shed a tremendous flood of light on the world before Christ as well as the world shortly after. The Dead Sea Scrolls was just a little wave; there is now a flood—a total Christian library from upper Egypt⁷¹ confirming, embellishing, establishing a world view that is incredibly similar to that which Joseph Smith taught the world.

I studied at Harvard during what was called the “Welhausen Era,” an era that is now defunct. The approach to the Old Testament was to deny its historicity almost carte blanche, to speak of it as great literature, to speak of it as poetic allegory, and to separate it rather completely by the Marcionite heresy from the New Testament. That will no longer do. No scholar with any sensitivity to the documents can say this.

The Qumran community—only a part of their records are so far translated—was, as Frank Cross⁷² calls it, a “church of anticipation.” Many things that Christians had heretofore supposed were original, unique, and singular in Jesus are very patently there—as much as two hundred years before. That, to them, is a terrible indictment of Christ. For us, it is exactly what he himself has taught—a dispensation plan and pattern of history. Christ came before: and Christ will come after. He was the Jehovah who manifested himself to the Old Testament prophets. And Adam and Eve, both genuine historical persons, were by him taught the fullness—the all—of the gospel.

Today there is a temple scroll, still not completely translated into English, twenty-eight feet long confirming our own understanding.⁷³ There is a gospel called the Gospel of Thomas which rings like the King Follett Discourse, assuming that man is already in one sense divine.⁷⁴ There is a Gospel of Philippians which reads like Section 132, that marriage is the highest sacrament.⁷⁵

“Is the Gospel of Thomas a fifth gospel?” I asked Helmut Koester at Harvard. He replied, “No, but it is another witness for Christ.” “Do the Dead Sea Scrolls suggest that the expectation of Christ presupposes a restitution of all things?” I asked Krister Stendahl, a world authority on Matthew. He replied, “Definitely.” “Do the gifts of the spirit,” I asked historian Timothy Smith at Johns Hopkins, “characterize the New Testament? Was there a pentecostal movement in Acts?” He replied, “Yes.”

Such a cosmology is shown in these documents! It involves the preexistence of all mankind, all intelligences; it involves teaching of living prophets, councils, groups, twelves. It involves patriarchs and prophetic blessings, a panoply of angels and archons who visit mankind, descending and ascending. It involves ordinances which are eternal and exceptionless through which men have contact with the mysteries and powers of godliness. It speaks of sealing. It speaks of becoming possessors of the all, the fullness of the glory of the Father—not simply becoming like Christ in some distant behavioral sense, but like him in nature. It speaks of the sacredness of ancient Israel, its scattering and gathering; of the creation drama; of the patterns of rising and falling which resemble in breathtaking similarity the ups and downs of the Book of Mormon. It speaks of glory, of light, of fire. It speaks of transmitting these blessings by the laying on of hands. (And within the current year, the Anglicans, who had not heretofore done it, began laying on hands in their ordination procedures.) It speaks of the early Church as the extension of Christ’s will for mankind.

In Coptic, in 1969, we discovered a prayer—the sacramental prayer it was alleged—and the words are almost identical to those in 3 Nephi.⁷⁶ There is the notion that the worthies could come and sup and feast with Christ and that even the Lord’s Prayer, which asks “give us this day our daily bread,” is a plea for a sacramental foretaste—the identical pattern one finds in the Doctrine and Covenants Section 27.

There is talk of priesthood authority, Aaronic and Melchizedek orders. There is talk of church authority so close to what we teach that the New English Bible, which has now been done without anti-papists as translators, teaches our doctrine of authority—clearly. There is talk of geographic changes in the cosmos, of worlds without number, of temples with their molten seas and qualifications of entry and holies of holies, of ordinances—including marriage—and even of mirrored bridal chambers.⁷⁷

One can read these today and feel that the Doctrine and Covenants itself is a giant apocalypse, that the great and ancient prophets Enoch and Abraham and Moses and Adam fit our descriptions and not the traditional and philosophical overlays. How could the Boy Prophet, who has been dead more than a full century, have done this? Only when an Arab boy near the Dead Sea or archaeologists in Northern Egypt stumbled onto records easily translatable did we suddenly have the sources. What do they show? The laws of evidence become more and more compelling. Joseph Smith had special contact with the original Authors.

The terminology of these books and even of contemporary theological writing picks up phrases which we thought we alone knew. For example: the new and everlasting covenant, Zion—the people of God, the measure of creation, the New Jerusalem, charismatic gifts, the special role of Enoch and Elijah, sealing, the winding up scene, Abrahamic astronomy, anointing, dispensation, Michael the Adam, the garments of the priesthood, white covenant robes, prayer patterns and orders, work for the dead, records on plates, Urim and Thummim, etc.

What Now?

What is the conclusion? Let me bring it to three points. First, we should rejoice and be exceeding wary. For while during the first generation Mormonism was thought to be utterly outlandish, we may live to see the generation in which it will be thought to be utterly obvious. The attending attitude in each case is the same—indifference. Unless we can testify with spiritual splendor that God has restored more than a pastiche, a glorious divine unity, unless we can bear witness that there is power from God in all that we witness, others will simply say, “We already have it. There is no more. Goodbye.”

Second, it is alleged that Brigham Young offered a tantalizing prediction a century ago.⁷⁸ He said the time would come when the elders would no longer testify and face rigid persecution of the basic truths of the gospel, for the constraint of evidence would have led much of the world to recognize them. The one thing they would go forth to the world to bear witness of was authority. The ultimate question would be, “Who has been commissioned of God?” And the final evidence for authority is not words. It is life, it is radiance, it is the expression of the Christ that is genuinely within.

And so I close with these words. If we would only testify to the truth as we see it, it would turn out at once that there are hundreds, thousands, millions of men just as we are who see the truth as we do; are afraid, as we are, of seeming to be singular by confessing it; and are only waiting, again as we are, for someone to proclaim it. As Leo Tolstoy is reported to have said to President Andrew White of Cornell, if Mormonism could be true to its foundation and remain unchanged for four generations, it might well become the most powerful social influence in the world. Tolstoy was concerned with the social; we are concerned as well with the vertical—with the divine. Social transformation can only come in the wake of individual transformation under the power of the living Christ. I bear witness that this is so in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.