(Guest Post)

What do we actually worship? I’ve been stuck on that question, and a talk President Oaks gave to new mission presidents this year is the reason. Every year around this time, they gather at the MTC for special instruction from top church leaders—whatever gets said that week becomes the script these men carry for the next three years. I was in the MTC for it in 2004, close enough to meet leaders I’d only ever seen on a broadcast from another state. This year, Oaks handed them 3 characteristics of the “only true and living” church.

  1. The Church of Jesus Christ has the fulness of his doctrine
  2. The Church of Jesus Christ has His priesthood authority
  3. The Church of Jesus Christ has a ‘unique testimony of Christ’

Pres. Oaks remarked on each of these, and I want to reference some of those comments. But I’ll preface all of it with a question: what do we actually worship?

I have a sister who attends divinity school for fun and personal enrichment, and one of the ideas she’s shared with me from her time there has stuck. She says we often worship our idea of a thing rather than the thing itself. We build a careful picture of what something is—what makes it special, what sets it apart, what we have that others lack—and then we end up bowing to the picture. The distinction sounds subtle, but here’s the tell: the more energy we pour into distinguishing and characterizing a thing, the more we’re worshipping our characterization of it, not the thing. We’re loving the boundary we drew, not what’s inside it. Hold onto that idea, because I think it’s exactly what’s happening across all three of Oaks’s points.

In talking about fulness of doctrine, Pres. Oaks mentions:

  • Other churches have some truth, but the underlying message is they are wrong
  • We lost things during a supposed apostasy
  • We came to earth to get eternally married, which can only happen between a man and a woman
  • Have children so this cycle perpetuates ad infinitum
  • Marriage is required for exaltation—something distinctly different from salvation
  • The restored gospel is “comprehensive, universal, merciful and true”
  • “Kingdoms of glory” after we are resurrected

So apparently a fulness is eternal marriage and a top tier of heaven reserved for the heterosexually married. Everyone else is just “saved,” but to a lower kingdom. I don’t see how this is comprehensive and universal, but we’ll move on. Notice what the whole list is actually made of: boundaries. What we have that others don’t, what was lost that only we recovered, who’s in and who’s on a lower tier. None of it is a description of Jesus. All of it is a description of a distinction.

Pres. Oaks goes on to priesthood authority—”Priesthood offices and its authority do not come from a desire to serve or from reading the scriptures. That priesthood authority, together with the keys necessary to direct its operations, are in this restored Church and no other.” Again, a distinction. The church has special power that others do not. And again, that’s an idea about the institution, not a moment spent with the man.

His last point: “We have a unique and true testimony of Christ. This is the key to everything else. Our knowledge of the nature of God is what distinguishes us from the formal creeds of other Christian denominations.” Here’s what’s strange about resting your whole claim on distinguishing knowledge of the nature of God: that knowledge kept changing. God’s nature shifted substantially across Joseph Smith’s life, and in the King Follett discourse near the end of it, he taught that God was once a man as we are now—a real departure from the church’s own earlier teaching. Joseph, I believe, was signaling more change was coming when his life ended abruptly. John Turner’s Joseph Smith biography emphasizes that Joseph was constantly innovating and evolving theologically. This happened in part because members of the church had tough existential questions and he wanted to provide equally sound theological propositions in response to provide comfort. I think it’s safe to say that had Joseph lived longer, the church’s conception of the nature of God would have further evolved. As such, this one distinctive thing Pres. Oaks supposes we hold so firmly was, in fact, never stable, unmoving ground. I mean, we still don’t have a Heavenly Mother to speak of–even though we want to have one. I think if she were fully revealed and incorporated we’d, again, have to remake our understanding of the nature of God, the Godhead and priesthood office/authority.

Pres. Oaks makes it clear: “We are not grounded in the wisdom of the world or the philosophies of men, however traditional or respected they may be. Our testimony of Jesus Christ is based on the revelations of God to His prophets and to us individually.” Meaning we still are 100% reliant on the philosophies of men—we are just very choosy about the men, and we choose the right men, unlike other churches. It’s infallibility dressed up in nice clothes.

So where is the actual worship of Jesus, the person, in any of this?

We are mired in ideas. Ideas that make us distinct, ideas that make us special, ideas that give us control, ideas that give us power. Ideas, and not Jesus, are what we’ve made the center of our worship. This is exactly what my sister was describing—we’ve built a picture of the church, careful and flattering and set apart, and we bow to the picture. Members sometimes get agitated that other Christian denominations don’t consider the LDS church Christian. “Jesus Christ” is in the name, right? Yet instruction in the church is far more focused on “The Church” part of the name than anything else in it. The “Jesus Christ” part is often just a tool or in service of “The Church” part, not the other way around.

When I read the Jesus of the gospels now, I can’t help but think the LDS church has, over time, reinvented him into someone who barely resembles the man on the page. That man didn’t seem to care about fulness, priesthood authority, or unique testimonies—that was added later by the LDS church, by “revelation.” He healed a man on the Sabbath and got attacked for breaking the rule, and his answer was that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. When they dragged a woman caught in adultery in front of him with the law demanding she be stoned, he ignored the letter of it and sent her accusers away. When institutional doctrine was harmful to the people it was meant to serve, Jesus seemed completely fine casting it aside or reframing it until it helped living people again. Doctrine was never his centerpiece—people were, real living people. It seems to me that Jesus’ name is invoked mostly to serve the power and credibility of the institution, to control its members, rather than to actually strengthen the lives of people. Which makes me wonder if we ever worshipped the man, or only what he could do for the institution. 

What do you think? Do we worship Jesus the person, or have doctrine and truth claims become the center of worship? Is it even possible to worship Jesus, the person, or are we only ever choosing the Jesus we want to worship? What would a truly Christ-centered institution look like? Is institutional revelation a lever of control, or one that truly seeks to better the lives of people seeking after it?