There is an analogy that the Gospel and Church (capital C) are like an orange. The flesh of the orange is the Gospel, God, and his goodness. The skin (peal) is the Church, the administration, the human interface to God. Both of these are needed, but in proper proportions. If the skin is too thick, it takes away from the flesh, giving you little fruit to eat. If the peal is too thin, the flesh can dry out and be pithy.
Elder Poelman of the 70 gave a very famous talk in Oct 1984 General Conference where he advocated for a direct way to worship God that minimized the church (less skin, more flesh). For whatever reason (the Church never said why) Poelman re-wrote his talk, and re-recorded the video, giving the orange more skin.
This has been an age old battle from the beginning of the Christian/Judaeo religion. The Pentateuch (the first five books of the bible) is generally recognized to be compiled from multiple sources. Two sources are labled for the names they use for God, Elohim (E) and Yahweh or Jehovah (J). The third source is called P for Priestly, as it is thought the source for this was a priest like Aaron, or as biblical scholars say, an Aaronid priest.
The P parts of the bible generally reflects a very thick skin on the orange. If you have sinned and want to be forgiven, you need to bring a sacrifice to the priest at the Tabernacle. All interaction with deity required a priest as an intermediary.
J and E talk mostly talk of a merciful God that can be addressed directly. They talk of a God that is gracious, long-forbearing, and full of faithfulness and truth. P never uses the words mercy, grace and repent. In fact, if you just read the J and E parts of the bible, you don’t need priests to gain salvation. No skin on the orange, just flesh!
I’m sure you can see the similarity to the current LDS church and its leadership. There is a subtle friction between the E/J factions that talk of grace, and the P faction that requires justice, and that can only be gained through the church and its leaders. This also extends to our local leaders, some are E/J, and some are P.
What examples have you seen in your ward? Does your ward leadership have a thick or thin skin approach to guiding its members? What about the Q15?
Wheat & Tares 
It is human nature to miss the mission and preserve the institution, right in front of Jesus.
FYI: side by side comparison of the Poelman talk and the edited, printed version: https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/079-50-53.pdf
To my observation, the range of approaches to guiding Church members at all levels varies as widely as the ability of various members to believe impossible things. But that range is not distributed in the manner of a normal bell curve – it’s a bit heavier on the “priestly” side, with occasional leaders very much on the E/J side and some who manage to maintain balance.
Perhaps both skills – effective E/J guidance and believing “impossible” things — take practice and openness to possibilities outside one’s own prior way of looking at things, so that one doesn’t just keep practicing the same mistake:
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, Chapter V
I agree. I kind of think Joseph’s first vision was about a merciful and approachable God to tell a troubled young mind he is forgiven and loved as he is (E/J).
But was later reframed to build a thicker skin for the church movement (P), and emphasized “all other churches are wrong, join none of them.”
I believe this happens when the gospel motivates people to want to go do something about the principles that are mystical or mythical and spiritual in nature, and applying them to reality and giving them form, or a skin, will always be less than the perfect idea of what they are trying to do.
We want to grow closer to God, but it isn’t fair if the sinners get away with things, so the rules of the church grow and grow, and can thicken the skin too much.
But we have good people running the church and a part of the church, and so this ongoing conflict is recorrected or repented of.
Sometimes we need more rules to keep us steady, sometimes we loosen the rules to recapture the gospel principles.
If you take a snapshot at any given moment, it may look like the church is fallen or false. But it continues to try to be what many of us hope it is, and I think that is mostly the same thing Joseph was searching for in the trees of New York.
Perhaps the skin is needed, Bill. But I find I rip into it and discard it to get to the flesh. It doesn’t make it wrong…it is just part of the journey to get to where I need to go.
Bishop Bill,
As is unfortunately often the case in your posts, you have completely distorted the facts in order to fit your narrative. The Jahwist source is full of stories of God’s wrath against the disobedient (the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, condemning Israel to wander because). It’s also inaccurate to say there is no “peel” in the J source, since Moses clearly acts as an intermediary between Israel and Jehovah in what scholars have identified as the J portions of Exodus.
I don’t know much about the J, E, P sources, but I really like this orange/peel metaphor. The peel vs the skin makes me think of the development of my faith through my life. For many years, I have carefully carried, held, and preserved my orange. But now, I’m with Hebert3. I have begun to break through the peel and actually enjoy and be nourished by the sweet fruit inside.
I wonder if the metaphor resounds differently with men and women. I think for a woman it’s particularly apt because, while the ideal would be a scaffold that supports what an individual envisions as their talents, their life and their way to the eternities, the peel is a clear reflection of the church’s influences containing a woman into a predetermined life that may or may not fit her and her objectives.
I wonder if that would apply to gay Saints or to men or to ethnic groups, but only having the experience of being a straight woman, I can only speak from that perspective. In any case, it’s sad that the church is so profoundly skewed to the perspective of White, straight men and boys.
Dsc, as is unfortunately often the case in many of your comments, you have completely distorted my words in order to fit your narrative. Yes, both J/E at times talk of a vengeful God full of wrath, and yes Moses does act as an intermediary, but I didn’t say “always”, I used the words “generally” and “mostly” to convey that when their body of work is taken as a whole, they “generally” fall into the patterns described. But you would have been correct in your critique had I said “always” .
Bishop Bill,
I don’t think even your weasel words catch even the jist of the J and E sources. In fact, I would say that it totally distorts the themes found therein.
At any rate, you also falsely claimed “no peel”, which is totally false. Care to address that?
And to be clear, the J and E sources do in fact talk about mercy and repentance, but they primarily due so after the Lord threatens His wrath (e.g. when the Lord threatens to destroy Israel and choose Moses’ posterity instead, but instead acts mercifully).
I also doubt that the P source contains literally no reference to mercy or repentance. I haven’t heard that before, but if you have a source that says that, by all means, show me.
The source is Friedman’s “Who Wrote the Bible”. He used the word “never” for mercy and repent. You can take it up with him.
You can actually peel an orange, separating the peel from the good stuff. It is much tougher to make a clean separation between some sort of pristine Gospel and all the other stuff we would like to assign to The Church (an institution) or Mormon Culture. If you look candidly at LDS history, a lot of stuff that was once thought to be securely in the Gospel basket turns out, in our day, to be quite dispensable, in particular polygamy and the racial priesthood and temple ban (based on LDS racial doctrine which stubbornly persists).
So the Gospel/Church or Gospel/Culture distinctions are easy to assert in theory but tougher to apply in practice. A better approach, I think, is simply to look at what we’ve got — a mixture of gospel, institution, and culture — identify what can be reformed or improved, and change things for the better.
Oh, so what we have here is a different P-source problem: “plagiarism”.
The problem with the Documentary Hypothesis is its circularity of reasoning. Someone like Richard Friedman can argue that there are zero references to mercy in the P source because we’ve identified the P source (at least in part) by identifying language that deemphasizes mercy. Thus, we have the problem of Exodus chapter 20:5-6, which some scholars have attributed to P [1] (perhaps due to its mention of justice), or J (perhaps due to its emphasis on mercy), all four sources (J, E, P, and D) due to characteristics of all of them [3], or perhaps most tellingly of the reader’s choice nature of DH, the parts that feel priestly to P and the parts that feel Jahwist to J [. But, if you assign it to any source, no matter which source it is, you’re doing so because it meets whatever characteristic you believe each source to have,not because of actual evidence from a separate source text. This is why the whole documentary hypothesis has become disfavored over the last forty years. [5]
[Apologies for the out of order citations; browser issues]
[1] https://en.m.wikiversity.org/wiki/Bible/King_James/Documentary_Hypothesis/Exodus
[4] https://www.westarinstitute.org/resources/the-fourth-r/select-list-articles-from-fourth/justice-mercy-hebrew-bible/
[3] https://books.google.com/books?id=p_1CAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA84&lpg=PA84&dq=visit+iniquity+generations+mercy+thousands+j+source&source=bl&ots=lbq3rMOGp4&sig=ACfU3U1HgKBrMp1HXOlqqDFfNwipQ5L0tw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwidz5vcjo_gAhUR7J8KHb2rDhIQ6AEwAHoECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q=visit%20iniquity%20generations%20mercy%20thousands%20j%20source&f=false
[5] https://www.sbl-site.org/publications/article.aspx?ArticleId=553
[2] https://webpages.scu.edu/ftp/cmurphy/courses/sctr015/prep/exercises/yahwist.htm
Bishop Bill,
Also, I’m still waiting for you to explain how you can say, given the J/E sources’ depiction of Moses as intermediary between Israel and the Lord, that if you read only J/E, it’s “No skin on the orange, just flesh!”
Apparently I have a comment awaiting moderation. Posting again without the links.
Oh, so what we have here is a different P-source problem: “plagiarism”.
The problem with the Documentary Hypothesis is its circularity of reasoning. Someone like Richard Friedman can argue that there are zero references to mercy in the P source because we’ve identified the P source (at least in part) by identifying language that deemphasizes mercy. Thus, we have the problem of Exodus chapter 20:5-6, which some scholars have attributed to P [1] (perhaps due to its mention of justice), or J [2] (perhaps due to its emphasis on mercy), all four sources (J, E, P, and D) due to characteristics of all of them [3], or perhaps most tellingly of the reader’s choice nature of DH, the parts that feel priestly to P and the parts that feel Jahwist to J [4]. But, if you assign it to any source, no matter which source it is, you’re doing so because it meets whatever characteristic you believe each source to have,not because of actual evidence from a separate source text. This is why the whole documentary hypothesis has become disfavored over the last forty years [5].
It’s an interesting metaphor. The thing about forced structure is that sometimes it is a good thing. As an artist, I find that force or constraint in some ways (but not always) will push me into creative paths I wouldn’t have ordinary taken. It becomes a foil. In some ways I think of the Church as my personal foil as well. The problem is that it can’t ever be about the peel/foil. That can never be the point. And its so much easier to let it be than work within the fruit.
When I saw the three-word title, my first thought was that the posting was about the sitting U.S. president.
The Waters of Mormon are heavy on the “bear one another’s burden” aspect. How shall that be done? It can be done willy-nilly, but it is a lot more efficient if there’s some leadership, a brokerage perhaps that matches needs and providers.
I sense that some would go back to the ascetics of old; doing nothing for self OR others, but sitting there thinking of God and Jesus. No skin on the orange.
I have a doubt that the church has ever intended to fully institutionalize all service (not to say some members would like to do just that). Most service should be personal, neighbor to neighbor, and not on anyone’s book of rememberance or register save only your personal journal.
Church helps set the boundaries of guilt. It’s like when I counsel Boy Scouts; “good turn daily” is not world peace! It’s something you can do for others without harming yourself or unnecessarily disadvantaging your family. Church provides example and counsel. What of that you accept is entirely personal.