Gospel Learning Takes Time.

Some gospel questions are really tough and can make us feel conflicted. You know, those topics. Plural marriage, gay marriage, blacks being denied the priesthood, the problem of evil, weird policies the church used to have, women not getting the priesthood. For many people topics like these are troublesome enough to shake people's faith and even lead to them leaving the church.

In Dieter F. Uchtdorf's October 2013 conference talk, he said, "Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters—my dear friends—please, first doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith. We must never allow doubt to hold us prisoner and keep us from the divine love, peace, and gifts that come through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ."

In the past year or so I have heard of some people who thought for a long time that they were supposed to just put these questions on the shelf, i.e. ignore them or forget about them. Eventually what happened was that they decided to take the questions off the shelf, didn't like what they saw, and left the church, often after looking at anti-Mormon literature. I think we have to be careful when we quote Elder Uchtdorf and say, "Doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith," because after rereading his talk I don't think he was saying we should ignore our questions. (I won't pretend to understand what goes through someone's head when they decide to leave the church. That doesn't happen to be my trial and it's never been a temptation for me.)

Instead, I think what he means is that when we have doubts we should cling to our faith, the things we do know, and trust that God will help us increase in understanding if we keep working on our testimonies. If we become too fixated on our doubts we may miss out on the blessings of peace, love, joy, service, and righteous works that are the fruits of our faith.

When we rely on our faith (including spiritual experiences we have had), trust in God, and keep working on building our faith through study, prayer, and good works, we come to understand the tough questions better. It's important to remember that the answers to our questions can't always come at once. It might be that you need to learn more about humility, service, the Atonement, the priesthood, baptism, or other principles before getting understanding about the things you want to know. In some cases the answer won't make sense if you haven't had enough experience or developed certain virtues enough. If you just put your questions on the shelf and convince yourself to ignore them, you won't be any closer to the answer. But if instead you go to God in prayer and say, "I don't understand, and this bothers me, but please give me faith and help me to understand," the response might be to study about a specific topic, or work on developing a specific virtue, or get involved in some kind of church service. Then over time you will find that you are closer to understanding the hard questions.

I have never been completely easy with the idea of plural marriage in the LDS church. I don't think very many people are. I can definitely understand why Emma Smith had a hard time with Joseph practicing it. But I have found that I agree with Simon Peter in John 6:66-69:

66 From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.
67 Then said Jesus unto the twelve, Will ye also go away?
68 Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.
69 And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God.

If I left the church over the church's history of polygamy (not that this was ever a temptation for me), I know I would be missing all of the things in the gospel that I know are true. I believe in eternal families, proxy temple work for the dead, living prophets, the priesthood, the Atonement and the understanding of it that we get from modern revelation, and the Book of Mormon. There really is no other place I could go that would have these precious eternal doctrines. So instead I have stayed, acknowledging that I don't understand everything, and I have continued to work on my testimony.

A few years ago I started getting interested in doing my family history. At the time I started doing it because I was urged to get involved by the Holy Ghost, but what I didn't know was that my family history research would give me increased understanding of plural marriage.

I have some ancestors who practiced plural marriage. These include Stephen Chadwick Perry, Edwin Whiting, and Hans Peter Jensen. I transcribed life histories of them that had been passed down to me from family members and shared those on Family Search, and I also looked at the sources, stories, and pictures of them that were shared on Family Search by others.

What I have learned while doing this research is that when we learn about our ancestors they are with us. As I have learned more about these men, I have felt them near and I have become acquainted them and their families. And while there is much I don't know about plural marriage, what I do know is this: These were good and righteous men. I have felt this as I've learned about them. They had strong testimonies and faith in God, and they loved their wives and their children. They worked tirelessly to build Zion in Utah by serving in the church. So I feel that someday I will get an answer about plural marriage, and I will be okay with that answer, because I know that my ancestors who practiced plural marriage were in good standing with God. I didn't expect this understanding to come to me through doing family history, but I know that it came because I was willing to trust in my faith and in God and keep building my testimony by following the promptings of the Holy Ghost.

Behaving and Knowing

[Below I'm going to quote heavily from a BYU speech by Neal A. Maxwell called The Inexhaustible Gospel. I would highly encourage you to read the entire talk; it has really changed and enriched my perspective about knowledge and how it should take place in the gospel.]

Our knowledge of the gospel and the plan of salvation give us a unique perspective on the learning process. In the world so much of learning is focused on learning facts. We do often apply those facts in many contexts, but the world isn't great about using facts to change our behavior. In contrast, in the gospel of Jesus Christ, our behavior is an integral part of learning. We must develop virtues in order to gain knowledge of God, and if we are disobedient we limit our learning. And when we learn in the Lord's way, the possibilities are infinite!

"Multiple scriptures make it clear that knowledge is meant to be closely associated with other virtues such as patience, humility, charity, and kindness." (Neal A. Maxwell, The Inexhaustible Gospel)

One such scripture is Doctrine and Covenants 107:30-31:

30 The decisions of these quorums, or either of them, are to be made in all righteousness, in holiness, and lowliness of heart, meekness and long-suffering, and in faith, and virtue, and knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness, brotherly kindness and charity;
31 Because the promise is, if these things abound in them they shall not be unfruitful in the knowledge of the Lord.

The promise referred to in verse 31 can be found in 2 Peter 1:5-9:

 5 And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge;
 6 And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness;
 7 And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity.
 8 For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
 9 But he that lacketh these things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins.

So we can see from these verses that in order to be rich in the knowledge of Jesus Christ we should be developing these and many other virtues and striving to follow Christ's example. It really makes sense--how can we have knowledge of Christ and the gospel if we aren't living a Christ-like life? How can we understand his life and mission if we aren't living a similar lifestyle?

When we focus on getting knowledge, even gospel knowledge, without being obedient to gospel truths, we actually limit the amount of knowledge and wisdom we can get: 

"Knowledge, if possessed for its own sake and unapplied, leaves one's life unadorned. A Church member, for instance might describe the Lord's doctrines but not qualify to enter the Lord's house. One could produce much brilliant commentary without being exemplary. One might be intellectually brilliant but Bohemian in behavior. One might use his knowledge to seek preeminence or dominion. Such are not Jesus' ways, for he asks that perception and implementation be part of the same spiritual process." (Neal A. Maxwell, The Inexhaustible Gospel)

Those who are brilliant but not obedient are missing out on precious truth and experiences. In the gospel so much of our knowledge can only be gained by obeying the commandments and by so doing learning for ourselves that they are true and right. We will really only understand the way the universe works if we have a relationship with our Savior and know that the entire purpose of all of God's creations is "to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man" (Moses 1:39).

“Gaining knowledge and becoming more Christ-like ‘are two aspects of a single process.’ (Warner, Encyclopedia of Mormonism, vol. 4, p. 1490). This process is part of being ‘valiant’ in our testimony of Jesus. Thus, while we are saved no faster than we gain a certain type of knowledge, it is also the case, as Richard Bushman has observed, that we will gain knowledge no faster than we are saved (Teachings, p. 217). So we have a fundamentally different understanding of knowledge and truth—behaving and knowing are inseparably linked.

“So defined, the gospel is inexhaustible because there is not only so much to know, but also so much to become!” (Neal A. Maxwell, The Inexhaustible Gospel)

I love that last phrase. It's not just that there are a lot of facts to learn in the gospel. Our actions are part of our learning, and when we live the principles we have learned, we are then prepared to understand and live even more principles of the gospel. The potential is infinite when we couple what we know with how we behave.

On his Facebook page Elder Bednar recently said:

"In the scriptures, we are often taught about the principle of 'line upon line.' This principle is applicable in all facets of life. 

"When we attend church, do we expect to hear something new each time? The reality is that messages may be similar orally, but the Spirit will individually teach us in new ways. This is one reason why we should seek to always have His Spirit to be with us. It is up to us to hear with spiritual ears what is being said. Never discredit the central truths of the gospel simply because they are familiar or repeated often. 

"As we learn and apply the gospel in our lives, we will be strengthened to progress and overcome temptations. The world may grow more and more wicked, but our personal conversion will deepen and we will be able to press forward with faith in the Savior."

Once I read a blog post by a person who had lost her love of the scriptures. When she joined the church she devoured the scriptures and read through the standard works several times. But after reading them so many times she felt that she knew the stories very well and got bored, so she decided that the scriptures weren’t the only source of inspiration and took to replacing her scripture study with reading philosophy and other things she thought were inspiring. I felt confused by the post because I’ve read the Book of Mormon several times and I still learn from it every time. Then I realized based on her comments that she was mainly reading the scriptures on an intellectual level, and once she felt very familiar with the stories she wasn’t intellectually getting much out of them anymore. Don’t read the scriptures and the words of the prophet on just an intellectual level! Yes, we need to know the information, but as we apply it we become wise and are capable of learning even more because of our experiences. That’s why the gospel is “inexhaustible.” Even after we are very familiar with the scriptures, there is much to learn through the experience of applying the principles in the scriptures to our lives, and that experience changes as our circumstances change.

"Clearly, what we carry forward [to the world to come; see Doctrine and Covenants 130:18-19], brothers and sisters, involves developing our capacity for cognition as well as application. This sets us apart from the world . . . Certainly, what we will carry forward is more than what we now term as IQ or databases. It is the entire being of the individual." (Neal A. Maxwell, The Inexhaustible Gospel)

We know from Doctrine and Covenants 130:18-19 that it's important to seek knowledge and intelligence because what we learn will stay with us in the world to come and be an advantage. But based on the scriptures I think it's clear that here we're not just talking about facts. The only way our knowledge and intelligence will be an advantage to us in the Celestial Kingdom is if we have taken that knowledge and applied it to our behavior. Otherwise we won't be worthy to live there. But if our knowledge is coupled with application of that knowledge we will be prepared and worthy to be a part of the work of the Celestial Kingdom for all eternity. God's work is what makes knowledge worth having.

>>Gospel Learning Takes Time

Converting Knowledge to Wisdom

The scriptures can seem like a mixed bag when they talk about wisdom and knowledge. There are times when they are described as attributes of people who are prideful, worldly, cruel, unkind, or irreverent. Then again, there are probably many more scriptures in which we are urged to seek wisdom and knowledge.

 I think the prophets and apostles of today have made it clear that we are to learn and get as much education as we possibly can. But in order to keep our faith and use our knowledge to help God's work, we need to seek learning in a certain way.

Marion G. Romney gives some great insights about this in Converting Knowledge to Wisdom. As he discusses in the talk, our world has made incredible strides when it comes to knowledge, and in many fields, such as medicine, technology, and engineering, we have greatly benefited from all this knowledge. But in many other areas we aren't much better off even though we know so much more. 

Our [the world’s] fatal weakness is, as already indicated, the inability to put to beneficial use knowledge which relates to our own personal conduct and to our dealings one with another on the local, national, or international level . . . Many in the world simply do not have the capacity to apply with wisdom the knowledge they have about the enslaving philosophies of Satan . . . What we desperately need is to recognize and acquire that quality which converts knowledge into wisdom . . .  

Mankind generally has proved short in wisdom on two counts. First, mankind does not have all the facts; and, second, mankind does not have the capacity to make maximum beneficial use of the facts it does have. Is there, then, no hope for improvement? Yes, there is a way. That way is for men to come to a knowledge of the true and living God. 

2 Nephi 9:28 says:

28 O that cunning plan of the evil one! O the vainness, and the frailties, and the foolishness of men! When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves, wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish.
29 But to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God. 

So we have a lot of knowledge, but in many cases, especially when it comes to our dealings with other people, we don't have the wisdom to use it. It's not that the knowledge is bad, but if people don't choose to be wise they won't put what they know to beneficial use.

How do we convert knowledge into wisdom? We come to a knowledge of God. "The fear of the Lord (or, as Marion G. Romney changed it, profound reverence) is the beginning of wisdom." (Ps. 111:10) We hearken to God's counsels instead of pridefully assuming that we are so smart we don't need his help.

When Ryan and I moved to North Carolina, I attended NCSU for two years before deciding to transfer to UNC, and instead of driving to Raleigh I decided to commute there using Triangle Transit (it was a long trip!). I saw a lot of interesting people on the buses, but one particular bus ride still stands out in my mind. Two people on the bus were having a discussion about religion. They were convinced that religious people are completely irrational and they couldn’t understand why religious people can’t just come to their senses and see how crazy their faith is. Then the young man said (and I’ll edit out his colorful language), “Forget God, I’ve got science.” I was filled with sorrow for this young man. He thought he was really smart because he wasn’t being duped by all that religious stuff, but I could see by his countenance and the things he had said that he was not actually happy, and I felt sorry for him because I could see that his irreverent attitude towards God was keeping him from developing wisdom. He may have thought that he was liberated by rejecting God, but what he didn’t realize was that he was actually limiting his ability to learn wisdom. This experience taught me that in order to become wise (instead of merely smart) it's necessary to have reverence for God.

The great thing about learning this way is that gaining wisdom actually enhances our ability to gain knowledge, and when we know more and have more faith in God we can then become even wiser! So really, knowledge and wisdom are both critical steps in the same process. In addition, when our relationship with God is the most important part of our learning, our knowledge doesn't make us prideful and unkind; rather, we feel grateful for all that we have learned and we have an increased desire to use our knowledge and wisdom to bless God's children.

There are many who are calling for the religious to leave their faith at the door rather than bring them into the public sector. But based on the thoughts I have just shared, I think it's clear that we definitely should not leave our faith at the door. Scientific facts aren't enough to make good choices in government, business, education, and our interactions with each other. The world needs not just the facts, but also the wisdom that we develop through our faith in God.

In many cases our ability to make wise decisions is dependent on how much knowledge we have. Anyone who has taken a test at school knows that you can't rely solely on your relationship with God to do well on a test. He expects you to also study. Our relationship with God can help us to have increased understanding of the material and also helps us to see how it relates to the gospel, but when we haven't been diligent in seeking knowledge we can't expect Him to give us all the answers. 

However, sometimes we don't have all the facts and we still need wisdom, and this is where it is so crucial to love God and have a relationship with him. At those times, we learn all we can and seek guidance from the Holy Ghost to make a wise decision.

I experienced this principle last year when we had to make some important decisions about Kevin's education. Our options were: send him to Kindergarten in the public schools, wait a year, homeschool him for a while, or send him to a preschool for older kids (which wasn't really an option since we couldn't afford it). Kevin's birthday is in July, so he would be the youngest in his class and likely less mature. He also had a lot of behavior problems and could only write two or three letters, so I knew he might have behavior problems at school and would be behind with his writing. Logically I thought public school made the least sense. But Ryan and I prayed about it and whenever I prayed about it I had a feeling of peace when I thought about sending him to public school and a feeling of confusion and chaos when I thought about the other options. I knew that even though logically public Kindergarten made the least sense, the Spirit was telling us that it was the right choice. So with faith we sent him to public school. It turned out to be the best choice. Kevin grew that year in ways that wouldn’t have happened with homeschool or preschool. We didn't have all the facts, but God did, and I am grateful that despite our lack of knowledge we were able to make a wise choice with the help of the Holy Ghost.

In our dealings with others, we may have a lot of facts and a lot of research to guide us in our interactions, but we will hardly ever have all the facts. This is why we can't leave our faith at the door. We need our relationship with God and the guidance of the Holy Ghost to convert what knowledge we have into wisdom as we interact with our coworkers, neighbors, family, and strangers. This is how learning works when it is done in the Lord's way.

>>Behaving and Knowing

Using God to Fill in the Gaps

Recently an interesting picture showed up in my Facebook news feed. If you do a Google search for "two bodies of water meet but don't mix" you'll find a lot of pages that discuss this picture, but here's just one. I haven't taken the time to delve too much into the scientific explanation, but it sounds like what's happening is that glaciers are melting and the water is flowing into the Gulf of Alaska, and because of the difference in density between the meltwater and the salty ocean water, a surface tension forms between them and prevents them from mixing (although they do eventually mix). Pretty cool, huh?

Unfortunately, this is not the description that was given with the picture on Facebook. On Facebook, the claim was that this is a place in the ocean where the water flows in opposite directions and never mixes, and scientists have been completely unable to explain why it happens. The post claimed that there are many phenomena such as this in the world that can't be explained by science and they all serve as proof that God exists because nothing else could explain them.

Interestingly, this Facebook post I described actually strengthened the boundary between two opposing groups. Glancing through the comments (I know, bad idea) I saw that people who knew the science and were already disenchanted with religion saw this post and concluded that people who believe in God are not interested in the truth, but instead are being blind and foolish. And the unkind comments they made resulted in religious people feeling attacked and thus feeling even less willing to interact constructively with those who are not religious. So just like the two bodies of water weren't mixing because they were so different, these two groups were refusing to mix or interact constructively and intelligently with each other. I don't think it was helpful for this picture to be shared with a dishonest caption claiming that God was the only explanation for the phenomenon, because it created rifts between religion and science that don't need to be there. Just like the two bodies of water eventually mix, the religious and the scientific can exist together.

Soon after this, my husband pointed something out to me that had never occurred to me before. Sometimes Christians use God to fill in the gaps for the things we don't understand. If some phenomenon in the world happens and they don't know why, they claim that God did it. The trouble with this philosophy is that it becomes problematic when scientific explanations do come. What do you do with those scientific explanations? If you accept them, that's one less gap for God to fill. It can feel like accepting the scientific explanation makes the gaps smaller, and if the gaps are smaller does that mean you're making God smaller? I think this may be why some people are reluctant to accept scientific explanations, especially claims about evolution or the age of the earth, and this may partly explain why in church we sometimes equate knowledge with wickedness. As Christians it is easy to feel that if you believe in an old earth or evolution your faith in God is somehow decreasing. (And I should add here that I have at times experienced these feelings too, so I'm not trying to be critical of anyone--as a person who believes in God it can be difficult sometimes when we're not sure how scientific explanations fit in with our faith.)

I don't know how it all fits together. Personally I'm okay with the idea that the earth is a few billion years old while simultaneously believing that it was created by Jesus Christ under God's direction. I'm also for the most part okay with the theory of evolution and I believe that it happens, although as I've mentioned before on this blog, it does bring up some confusing implications about Adam and Eve. I really enjoy learning more about how the world works, and the more I learn, the more I feel inspired by my Heavenly Father's wisdom and grateful to Him for the opportunity to live my mortal life.

I think the important thing is to remember what God's purpose is. He told Moses: "For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." (Moses 1:39) For me, God's purpose isn't to serve as an explanation for things I don't understand. He's not here to give us a magic show. God's entire work is salvation. And if we make salvation the center of our relationship with Him, then our faith is much stronger. If my faith in God rested on the mysteries in nature I think it would have broken down several years ago when I started studying geology. But instead the basis of my faith in Him has become the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Each time I use the Atonement I have more evidence that God and Jesus Christ are real because by repenting and receiving forgiveness I feel their presence in my life.

>>Converting Knowledge Into Wisdom

The Gift of Knowledge

If you have been a member of the LDS church for more than a few years you have probably attended a lesson at church in which the gifts of the Spirit were discussed. 1 Corinthians 12 and Doctrine and Covenants 46 are two places in the scriptures that list gifts of the Spirit.

The gifts of knowledge and wisdom are two spiritual gifts listed in these chapters, and in church classes the discussion of these gifts tends to focus on the difference between them. Interestingly, in my experience, the majority of the time the conclusion seems to be that knowledge is inferior to wisdom, or even the unrighteous version of wisdom. Often in these discussions I feel that the underlying feeling about seeking knowledge is, "Well, it's okay if you like to learn things, but just keep in mind that it's dangerous to get too smart because knowledge makes you prideful, so be careful." There was even a time when I visited my parents' ward, and when the teacher asked for some modern parallels of a wicked group of people from the scriptures, a man raised his hand and said, "Scientists!"

After one class about gifts of the Spirit a few years ago, I came home feeling troubled because this conclusion didn't feel right to me. Why would knowledge be a gift of the Spirit if it's not worth having? Since then I have pondered this a great deal, and recently I had the opportunity to look at the subject in even greater depth because I was asked to teach a class about it at Stake Women's Day.

I think part of the confusion comes because of semantics. Sometimes in the scriptures knowledge and wisdom are desirable, and other times they are described as worldly or as the causes of wickedness.

In his talk, Converting Knowledge into Wisdom, Marion G. Romney gives some definitions:

The dictionary distinguishes wisdom from knowledge--which, it says, denotes "acquaintance with, or clear perception of, facts," and from science, which "is exact, organized, and classified knowledge, especially in relation to the physical world," and from information, which is defined as "knowledge communicated or acquired, especially by reading or observation." Wisdom as distinguished from these, it says, "is the capacity of judging soundly and dealing broadly with facts, especially in their practical relations to life and conduct." 

. . . Since knowledge is an "acquaintance with, or clear perception of, facts;" and wisdom is "the capacity of judging soundly and dealing broadly with facts; especially in their practical" application "to life and conduct," it follows that wisdom is a product of, and is dependent upon knowledge.

That last phrase is important. Yes, we should strive to learn wisdom. But how can we have wisdom if we aren't clearly acquainted with the facts? We need knowledge; God wants us to seek for knowledge because without it we cannot be wise. In fact, after studying the scriptures and the words of the prophets I have come to realize that learning is preparation for eternity.

Boyd K. Packer said:

As we learn about ourselves and learn about the great plan of redemption, we know that in the premortal existence intelligence existed forever. It was not created. It will exist forever. In due course, we were given a spirit body. We became then the sons and daughters of God . . . While in that existence, we were valiant and chose good . . . Then, in the course of our having chosen good . . . we had a body prepared by mortal parents, and we were born into mortality. (Boyd K. Packer, The Instrument of Your Mind and the Foundation of Your Character)

I think it’s interesting that before we were given spirit bodies we were called intelligences. So even then we had some knowledge. Then as God has given us spirit bodies and physical bodies our capacity for understanding has increased.

We learned the gospel in the spirit world, but without a body we were limited in our ability to grow and apply the gospel. We also couldn’t be like God because he had a body. So we were born into mortality and now we have bodies. Boyd K. Packer also said, “Our spirit and our body are combined in such a way that our body becomes an instrument of our mind and the foundation of our character.” (The Instrument of Your Mind and the Foundation of Your Character)

Put this way, we can see that our bodies are a gift from our Heavenly Father to help us learn. Learning was one of the central purposes for sending us to earth, and when we are resurrected we will have an even greater capacity for learning.

We shouldn't squander our mortal life. Because our bodies are instruments of our minds we need to use this gift to learn as much as we can. Joseph Smith taught: "Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection. And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through his diligence and obedience than another, he will have so much the advantage in the world to come." (Doctrine and Covenants 130:18-19) Now, it's not a race; God recognizes that we all learn (both spiritually and intellectually) at different paces. But I think it's clear that as resurrected beings we will be grateful that we sought knowledge during our mortal probations.

>>Using God to Fill In the Gaps