Help me understand marriage doctrine…

To me this whole question is a can of worms. I don’t fault you for asking it. But ask 5 different members and you’ll get five different answers.

Some will say that if due to no fault of your own you don’t get married in this life, you get a second chance. Others will say you’re accountable in the next life if you have the opportunity in this life and don’t take it. Some will say that your personal salvation is not dependent on your spouse also being saved, others will say it is. Some will say that there is progression within the celestial kingdom. You can enter at the lower level of the celestial world, and work your way up through marriage there.

If you really want to baffle a priesthood leader, then ask what happens if a couple is sealed, and the husband dies, and then the person left behind marries someone else. If it’s a man, they have many wives. What about the woman? What if she ends up loving her new husband better than the one she was sealed to who died? All those kinds of what-if questions lead leaders to say “God is going to have to work that out when the time comes”….

It’s kind of like the doctrine of Godhood….one one hand, it’s very empowering to indicate we will progress to become like God, literally. It’s nice to know that God progressed from manhood to Godhood and so can we.

But then it begs the question, where did God come from? Guess what, no one knows. We have a very expensive religion that you find ultimately, doesn’t answer a lot of the important questions. It’s all conjecture when you get to the brass tacks on issues like these.

But if you are prepared to look at it simply, it works for a lot of people. I find religion in general seems to work very well for people that prefer simple binary solutions and look no further. Not me — the questions don’t even seem worth entertaining for me anymore as I know they are not verifiable.

Not that I fault your question, by any means, but I just find that after years of chasing answers, the only thing I know for sure is that I don’t know.

I also don’t believe section 132 is revelation or scripture, and like Ray that solves a bunch of questions for me. Likewise, I think there has been tons of speculative commentary in the past (and some in the present) relating to that section – meaningless speculation because it’s all the speculation of men. I think the best answer really is the one alluded to by SD – it will all be worked out in the end. I also recognize that this answer is not adequate for everyone.

I have decided that should my wife predecease me I have little desire to remarry (following Elder Scott’s example). I’m not sure of her feelings on the topic because I’ve never asked her but she is free to do what she wants should I predecease (I’m liking that word right now for some reason) her. I tend to focus on the here and now. I don’t recall Christ saying much about the afterlife (other than the many mansions thing) but I do recall reading other things he spoke of which seem to have been more important.

No disrespect intended, but if you’re looking for an apologetic view go ask apologetics. There are few of those here.

Our temple theology now makes no distinction regarding who will be sealed eternally. We seal everyone who has been married. Everyone. We let them and God work it out.

Doesn’t matter what that section says. We don’t teach what it says currently. Our teachings are different now.

I love the concept of continuing revelation, especially in instances like this.

See, for me, big changes in our understanding of fundamental doctrines implies that our revelation is not revelation at all, and that everything we believe right now may be considered totally incorrect at some time. Kind of like the repudiation of the priesthood ban — prophets upon prophets referred to the priesthood ban as doctrine, and it disadvantaged many many black members. Now we repudiate it — that means that prophets CAN lead the membership astray, so everything we believe is up for negotiation, and the “one true church” concept seems to lack the power it once had. In short, I can’t trust much to be inviolate in our religion.

Some might say that’s great — and to me, it IS great in a church that uses its own ignorance as a premise for humility. For a church that sees this life as one of searching for true doctrine. But that’s not our premise. We claim to have it all — but can we claim this when we can pick and choose which parts of our revealed scriptures are truly revelatory? Particularly after claiming its all revelatory and true?

Again, I am in favor of knowledge growing and changing, but the LDS church has its leaders in a kind of box when they claim everything is so inspired and we have the full truth.

It’s not like the Dunkers, a now defunct group that practiced at the time of Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin, in his autobio, indicates the Quakers made regular fools of themselves by claiming all war was wrong, but then finding workarounds to give supplies and aid to war efforts due to imposed laws and indirect desire to support the people at war with the British. Then he constrasts this to the Dunkers:

These embarrassments that the Quakers suffer’d from having establish’d and published it as one of their principles that no kind of war was lawful, and which, being once published, they could not afterwards, however they might change their minds, easily get rid of, reminds me of what I think a more prudent conduct in another sect among us, that of the Dunkers. I was acquainted with one of its founders, Michael Welfare, soon after it appear’d. He complain’d to me that they were grievously calumniated by the zealots of other persuasions, and charg’d with abominable principles and practices to which they were utter strangers.

I told him this had always been the case with new sects, and that, to put a stop to such abuse, I imagin’d it might be well to publish the articles of their belief and the rules of their discipline.

He said that it had been propos’d among them, but not agreed to, for this reason: “When we were first drawn together as a society,” says he, “it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were errors; and that others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing. Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological knowledge; and we fear that, if we should once print our confession of faith, we should feel ourselves as if bound and confin’d by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive farther improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from.”

This modesty in a sect is perhaps a singular instance in the history of mankind, every other sect supposing itself in possession of all truth, and that those who differ are so far in the wrong; like a man traveling in foggy weather, those at some distance before him on the road he sees wrapped up in the fog, as well as those behind him, and also the people in the fields on each side, but near him all appears clear, tho’ in truth he is as much in the fog as any of them. To avoid this kind of embarrassment, the Quakers have of late years been gradually declining the public service in the Assembly and in the magistracy, choosing rather to quit their power than their principle.

I am of the belief the restoration isn’t over and that God “will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.”

One way to reconcile this is to take the view that the church is progressing over time to align closer and closer with the will of God. Over time we are slowly able to purge the human prejudice, bias, and limitations from our doctrines. God will not force us to move faster than we are ready and waits for us to ask the important questions.

On the other hand, I believe that the religion of the ancient Israelites is fundamentally different from the religion of early Christians is fundamentally different from Christianity in the early 1800’s is fundamentally different from Pioneer Mormonism is fundamentally different from Mormonism today. I read a verse from the OT and I look for the will of God in those pages – yet the writers of those pages might feel justified in trying to stone me for celebrating Halloween or Easter. Similarly, I can read from the D&C and be inspired but it would be a mistake to assume that those verses were not written with the light and knowledge available at a particular point in time. The religion that they believed in and lived is loosely related but certainly not a perfect fit for my own.

We try to tie it all together in our minds as though it was one church then, now & forever or that the scriptures are the consistent word of God then, now & forever. My experience is that they are from different peoples trying to approach God, spirituality, and meaning in different ways.

The LDS church admitting mistakes on doctrinal issues is a double edged sword — a double edge that doesn’t exist in the other religious organizations to which I once belonged.

I remember once talking to a JW and he was comparing his church leadership to a steward or caretaker. This is someone (or group) authorized to look after the church in Christ’s absence. At the time this seemed pretty Ho-Hum compared to our church’s “Living Prophet” model. OTOH, I can see how the JW model might accommodate better for human mistakes without calling the divinity of the organization into question.

The LDS church admitting mistakes on doctrinal issues is a double edged sword — a double edge that doesn’t exist in the other religious organizations to which I once belonged.

I remember once talking to a JW and he was comparing his church leadership to a steward or caretaker. This is someone (or group) authorized to look after the church in Christ’s absence. At the time this seemed pretty Ho-Hum compared to our church’s “Living Prophet” model. OTOH, I can see how the JW model might accommodate better for human mistakes without calling the divinity of the organization into question.

If this was the model we were on, you wouldn’t be seeing several thousand posts from SD on Stay[insert church name here]. I’d still be working hard as a member of the congregation and most of the stuff that threw me into unorthodoxy wouldnt’ phase me. Add the one true church concept, 10% of net or gross in tithing, and then repeated instances of NOT living up to our own claims, and here I sit.

Happy, coping, having found my way, but certainly not on the conventional A team anymore.