Eugene England: "Why the Church is as true as the Gospel"

While I was recently re-reading this landmark essay the power of this segment struck me:

Even after a revelation is received and expressed by a prophet, it has to be understood, taught, translated into other languages, and expressed in programs, manuals, sermons, and essays—in a word, interpreted. And that means that at least one more set of limitations of language and world-view enters in. I always find it perplexing when someone asks a teacher or speaker if what she is saying is the pure gospel or merely her own interpretation. Everything anyone says is essentially an in­terpretation. Even simply reading the scriptures to others in­volves interpretation, in choosing both what to read in a par­ticular circumstance and how to read it (tone and emphasis). Beyond that point, anything we do becomes less and less “au­thoritative” as we move into explication and application of the scriptures, that is, as we teach “the gospel.”

Yes, I know that the Holy Ghost can give strokes of pure in­telligence to the speaker and bear witness of truth to the hearer. I have experienced both of these lovely, reassuring gifts. But such gifts, which guarantee the overall guidance of the Church in the way the Lord intends and provide guidance, often of a remarkably clear nature, to individuals, still do not override individuality and agency. They are not exempt from the limitations of human language and moral perception that the Lord describes in the passage quoted above, and thus they cannot impose universal acceptance and understanding.

This problem is compounded by the fundamentally para­doxical nature of the universe itself and thus of the true laws and principles that the gospel uses to describe the universe. Lehi’s law, “It must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things” (2 Ne. 2:11), is perhaps the most provocative and pro­found statement of abstract theology in the scriptures, because it presumes to describe what is most ultimate in the uni­verse—even beyond God. In context, it clearly suggests that not only is contradiction and opposition a natural part of human experience, something God uses for his redemptive purposes, but also that opposition is at the very heart of things; it is intrinsic to the two most fundamental realities—intelli­gence and matter, what Lehi calls “things to act and things to be acted upon.” According to Lehi, opposition provides the universe with energy and meaning, even makes possible the existence of God and everything else: Without it, “all things must have vanished away” (2 Ne.2:13).

We all know from experience the consequences for mortal life of this fundamental, eternal truth about reality. Throughout history, the most important and productive ideas have been paradoxical; the energizing force in all an has been conflict and opposition; the basis for success in all economic, political, and other social development has been competition and dialogue. Think of the U.S.federal system of checks and balances and a two-party political system (which together make pluralistic democracy pos­sible), or of Romanticism and Classicism, reason and emotion, freedom and order, individual and community, men and women (whose differences make eternal in­crease possible), justice and mercy (whose opposition makes our re­demption through the “At Onement” possible). Life in this uni­verse is full of polarities and is made full by them; we struggle with them, complain about them, even try sometimes to destroy them with dogmatism or self-righteousness, or retreat into the innocence that is only ignorance, a return to the Garden of Eden where there is de­ceptive ease and clarity but no salva­tion. William Blake, the prophetic poet, taught that “without contraries is no existence,” and warned that “whoever tries to reconcile [the con­traries] seeks to destroy existence.” Whatever it means that we will eventually see “face to face,” now we can see only “through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor.13:12), and we had better make the best of it. So, as we know it in human terms, the “gospel” is not—and perhaps, given the paradoxical nature of the universe itself, cannot ever be—a simple and clear set of unequivocal propositions.

And that is where the Church comes in. I believe it is the best medium, apart from marriage (which it much resembles in this respect), for grappling constructively with the opposi­tions of existence. I believe that the better any church or organization is at such grappling, the “truer” it is. And I believe we can accurately call the LDS church “the true Church” only if we mean it is the best organized method for doing that and is made and kept so by revelations that have come and continue to come from God, however “darkly” they of necessity emerge.

http://www.eugeneengland.org/why-the-church-is-as-true-as-the-gospel