Wrestling with Prophets
Transcending the Perils of Hero Worship and Individualism
As an active member of the Mormon faith for over thirty-three years, I have long been impressed with the words of prophets and apostles. My life unduly has been richly blessed by their counsel and teachings. I have grown nearer toward the Divine when reflecting on the beauty and power of their messages, and have equally been rewarded when practicing the simplicity and profundity of such messages. In short, I have accessed what might best be called a certain kind of “spiritual lightening” because of my response to their clarion call.
None of what I have described above makes me feel overbearing or touchingly maudlin. As I have stated elsewhere, I do not feel sentimental in my faith. Perhaps this is true because I also do not conflate my testimony of prophets and apostles with the unscriptural assumption that they are always right, or beyond criticism, or that vocally disagreeing with them somehow constitutes apostasy, or evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed. My loyalty to the Church is not uncritical loyalty. To be intimidated otherwise would be for me to allow obedience to trump conscience, to deliberately give consent to an action or proposition I felt was wrong.
This emotional posture, I admit, while certainly not popular in the Church, is very difficult for most Mormons to embrace, let alone meaningfully talk about in public and religious spaces. I’m not exactly sure why this is often the rule, but I assume that the fear of looking disobedient or having contrary opinions to the brethren offers too much friction to the soul longing for certainty, for security, and for safety. We long for each of these comforts, which is why there is truth to the old joke: “Catholics say the pope is infallible but don’t really believe it; Mormons say the prophet is fallible but don’t really believe it.” I sometimes wonder if members are not so much following prophets and apostles to seek after righteousness but rather are hoping that someone else will relieve them from the burden of conscience, the burden of freedom. Daniel Callahan writes:
“To lean upon the authority of the Church, by way of defaulting our own responsibility to think and to choose, is to run from our human dignity. To let others, whatever their stature or office, form our inner life is to abdicate our human freedom.”[i]
Do not misunderstand me. I am not suggesting you give free reign to any impulse you feel and call it your “conscience.” That is a reckless path fueled by ego and disaster. But in the end, when loyalty to Church authority is held in tension with the demands of an informed conscience, choose conscience. Choose the light within. Choose the still, small voice. And do so because you have worked out the answer with fear and trembling, not because you crave certainty and simplicity regardless the cost. Do not be hipster, avant-garde, or mincingly rebellious for their mere sake. Instead, choose conscience because it can be an instrument against idolatry, a tool against hero worship, and a weapon against prophetic adulation. Choose conscience because it can restore the personal dimension of your faith and profoundly shape your spiritual identity. In truth, your conscience can lead you away from the mainstream 99 where all is pharisaical well and can instruct you to seek after the marginalized 1, that man or women who needs you to uphold your baptismal covenant and mourn with them.
Tread lightly now. Push this pendulum too far left and you will give others good reason to argue that you had merely created the Divine in your own independent image, thus reinforcing the idolatry you were so eagerly seeking to escape. Your conscience needs the balance of community. It needs a family. And allowing yourself to feel the pressures and constraints of your family, your Church, can help to socialize, reshape and instill within you virtues of self-control. In 1897 sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote: “Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him.”[ii]
Families, then, as Terryl and Fiona Givens have illuminated, “help us submit to the hard schooling of love.”[iii] Families, like churches, like prophets and apostles, can help us avoid cheap grace, which is, as German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer offered, “baptism without the discipline of community.”[iv] This is exactly why wrestling with prophets and apostles — like Jacob wrestling the angel — can be so emotionally and spiritually revitalizing. Learning neither to give them your full assent nor full dissent can create a certain kind of redemptive schooling needed for your true liberation. Eugene England articulated this paradox in much richer ways:
“The Church is where there is fruitful opposition, the place where its own revealed nature and inspired direction maintains an opposition between liberal and conservative values, faith and doubt, secure authority and frightening freedom…It is precisely in the struggle to be obedient while maintaining independence…that we can gain the humility we need to allow divine power to enter our lives in transforming ways.”[v]
We are desperate for prophets and apostles to link us with the Divine. This attitude can definitely be a good thing. Yet, when holding such titanic confidence in them leads us to believe that they do not or cannot err on important questions, we might actually be engaged in a form idolatry that motivates us to live less meaningful lives than the Lord intends. Hugh B. Brown emphasized this point when he taught: “There are altogether too many people in the world who are willing to accept as true whatever is printed in a book or delivered from a pulpit. Their faith never goes below the surface soil of authority.”[vi] Brigham Young also protested against the pretense of fawning over our leaders:
“I am more afraid that this people have so much confidence in their leaders that they will not inquire for themselves of God whether they are led by Him. I am fearful they settle down in a state of blind self-security, trusting their eternal destiny in the hands of their leaders with a reckless confidence that in itself would thwart the purposes of God in their salvation, and weaken that influence they could give to their leaders, did they know for themselves, by the revelations of Jesus, that they are led in the right way.”[vii]
Contrary to this excellent counsel, I have seen members too commonly proof-text the scriptures to support the inerrancy of any ecclesiastical utterance. D&C 21:5 comes to mind: “For his word ye shall receive, as if from mine own mouth, in all patience and faith.” D&C 1:38 is another common text: “Whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same.” In proof-texting members lift these passages out of their prior context wherein the Lord teaches us that He has given His servants commandments “in their weakness,” notwithstanding that “inasmuch as they erred it might be made known…And inasmuch as they sinned they might be chastened, that they might repent.”[viii] Of course, members will casually admit that our leaders make mistakes from time to time — mistakes that are ultimately benign but never really injurious — but the irony often assumes that in any given, specific instance, a general authority is always right. The way is then open for us to fool ourselves into believing we have a relationship with the Divine based merely upon our belief that when a prophet speaks the conversation is over. Ironically, in a Church that espouses continuing revelation, the conversation is never over.
Members may have been originally counseled to “follow the Spirit” before their conversion, but once they are in the fold that language gradually gets translated into “follow the Brethren,” advice which can limit the variety of revelations they could possibly receive to the kind that merely confirms their leaders’ authority, not the kind that tests it. Sunday school, for example, can often feel like a ritualistic litmus test for determining one’s level of obedience. The more conservative and squarely align your answers are to the brethren, the more righteous and favored you are. In these ways, members transform the brethren into the original golden calf to serve a purpose that was never intended, and in doing so contravene such warnings as: “Trust not in the arm of flesh”[ix] and “I am the Lord thy God… thou shalt have no other gods before me.”[x]
Perhaps the biggest reason why prophetic adulation is so dangerous and unbecomingly Christian is that it neutralizes an individual’s right to protest, to object, and to cry out in pain. To override our ability to make these actions is to risk silencing the “still, small voice” from having effect in our lives. After all, if one admits that our leaders have been suspect in the past, have said things that are incorrect, inappropriate or downright wrong, one also begins to wonder if they are in someway failing now, a conclusion too devastating only to those who have failed to realize that the Lord can still work with imperfect vessels. And isn’t that amazing? — the fact that the Divine can still mediate through finite, fallible humans? Terryl and Fiona Givens have perhaps clarified the remarkable beauty of this principle better than anyone else I know:
“Surely no human can act with the wisdom, the perfect judgment, the infallibility of God. Precisely so. And if delegation is a real principle — if God really does endow mortals with the authority to act in His place and with His authority, even while He knows they will not act with infallible judgment — then it becomes clearer why God is asking us to receive the words of the prophet “as if from mine own mouth, in all patience and faith. …[thus] the Lord can delegate His authority to a human without any assumption that said human will always exercise that authority in perfect conformity with God’s intentions.”[xi]
None of what I have written so far has meant to reject the inspiration given to prophets and apostles. It has only meant to reject the cultural notion that inspiration necessarily implies inerrancy and infallibility. In my mind, knowing that our leaders are liable to err and yet can still creatively co-participate in the human-divine drama of revelation somehow makes my belief in them much more dynamic, real and steady. It gives me hope that maybe I — grossly imperfect I — can also participate in this grand terrestrial-celestial-revelatory theater. It means that I now have a work to perform, that I no longer can be complacent in living off of borrowed light, or assume that my salvation can be trusted in mortal hands.
Instead, I must graciously live with my doubts as I seek to alchemize them in the Divine Spirit. I must genuinely work to acquire that Spirit too, striving to be in-tune enough to know when a prophet speaks for the Divine, and when he speaks merely for himself. This gift of discernment, I believe, is a crucible’s fire that comes from within and without. It comes from listening to the Divine voice within our hearts — and — from listening from without, in the hearts of all our leaders and concerned members of our religious community. If we can somehow allow Christ to crucify in us our inflated opinions and expectations we have of ourselves but more particularly our leaders, I believe that we can live the abundant, meaningful lives that the Lord intends, free from the idolatries both of hero worship and rugged individualism. I believe we can learn to be healed.
Footnotes
[i] Callahan, Daniel. Honesty in the Church. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965). 161.
[ii] Durkheim, Emile. “Review of Guyau’s L’irreligion de l’avenir.” Trans. A Giddens. In Emile Durkheim: Selected Writings, ed A. Giddens. (New York: Cambridge University Press). 1887.
[iii] Givens, Terryl & Fiona. The Crucible of Doubt. (USA: Deseret Book Company, 2014). 44.
[iv] Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. “Costly Grace,” in The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). 43–44.
[v] England, Eugene. Why The Church Is As True As The Gospel. (USA: Bookcraft, Inc., 1986). 13–14.
[vi] Brown, Hugh B. “A Final Testimony” Memories of Hugh B. Brown. (USA: Signature Books). 18.
[vii] Young, Brigham. Journal of Discourses, Vol. 9, p. 150, 12 January 1862
[viii] D&C 1:24–27
[ix] D&C 1:19
[x] Ex. 20:2–3
[xi] Givens, Terryl & Fiona. 75.
