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I am having a really hard time reconciling some things within the LDS church. As was mentioned in another post I read today, there seems to be very little actual revelation within the church since early church history. I want to start a discussion on this, if it hasn’t already. The way I see it, there are three different types of communication with God:
1) Direct revelations wherein God is the one actually speaking, and the prophet is only the mouthpiece, i.e. the revelations in the D&C. In those cases, it is as though the person isn’t even there. God is talking and the prophet is just the transmitter. I don’t know of anyone within the church ever doing this, except for Joseph Smith. Am I forgetting someone?
2) Direct encounters with God or angels. Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon stated firmly that they saw Jesus Christ and described what he looked like. Joseph saw Moroni. He said he saw God the Father and Jesus Christ. He saw John the Baptist and Peter, James and John. Joseph F. Smith (or maybe Lorenzo Snow, I forget) described seeing Jesus in the temple and described exactly where he stood and some of what he looked like. Joseph F. Smith received the revelation about the spirit world through vision. There are other accounts of such witnesses, wherein the person actually meets a heavenly being or receives a vision.
3) All other kinds of inspiration. Feeling the spirit, praying for guidance, interpreting scripture through inspiration, etc.
Like I said, I have only heard of #1 coming through Joseph Smith. #2 has many more accounts, but none since the vision of the spirit world, as I remember. Everything else, including the revelation on the priesthood and race, seems to fall under #3. I am categorizing these based on church leadership and I recognize there are many other members of the church that have their own private experiences.
I have come to a place of peace about #3. I feel like I have a good grasp of how the inspiration people receive from God must still pass through imperfect, biased mortals. I feel like most of the issues brought up here fall under #3.
But what about these other witnesses? Was Joseph Smith just pretending to speak for God in those revelations? Would he and other prophets completely fabricate stories out of thin air about seeing Christ and angels? Were they hallucinating? I don’t believe that they lied about these things. Did they think they saw what they saw, but actually didn’t? That seems slightly more plausible to me than all of these people lying. But if we accept that these are true witnesses, then it almost makes my view of the church impossible to reconcile.
Why don’t we receive the same direct communication from God through literal mouthpieces, where God is clearly the speaker, not the person? Why do we hear absolutely no more accounts of our prophet and apostles witnessing that they actually saw Jesus Christ? The original apostles of Christ went around saying they actually saw his resurrected body. No such thing happens anymore today.
I have only 2 possible answers to these questions that still allow the church to be literally established by Jesus Christ:
1) Joseph Smith was meant to receive almost all of the revelations, to get the church started with a good foundation, and literal revelation was meant to be very sparse after that. Perhaps having people on this earth who communicate so directly and literally with God are far and few between. Perhaps Joseph Smith’s revelations were much more of a spectacular and rare gift than we thought, so that even our modern prophets just don’t have that kind of seership. God just needed to get that organization rolling, and let the imperfect inspiration of people slowly guide it through growing pains until the future day when the church is actually ready to receive Christ and has worked through all of its Stage 3 & 4 development.
2) Our modern prophets and apostles actually do still have direct experiences where they witness Christ or have visions, but are forbidden to share them with the world due to unbelief or some other reason. This one makes me uncomfortable, because if it is true, then I and many others are part of the problem–because we don’t have the faith necessary for these witnesses to be known. Or perhaps it is someone else’s fault that there isn’t enough faith. I am being slightly tongue-in-cheek with this last part, but it still does make me uncomfortable. Also, if this is the case, why aren’t the prophets getting up there during General Conference and saying something like, ,”God wants to reveal many wonderful things and miracles to the members of the church, but we must exercise greater faith to receive them” ?
What are your thoughts on all of this? How do you reconcile these multiple miraculous witnesses or direct speaking for God, with the complete lack of it nowadays? Why can’t we get anymore “Thus saith the Lord…”? I have heard many GC talks over the years trying to explain this: it is better to receive inspiration through the Holy Ghost than to have actual witness, etc. But I can’t help but feel like this is a subconscious attempt to deal with their own uncertainties about why they aren’t getting the kind of communication that Joseph did. They are trying to convince themselves it is more important, because they can’t explain why Christ isn’t manifesting himself. When I was younger, I used to firmly believe that the prophet and apostles did see Christ. In fact, I assumed that when they were called to the apostleship, Christ probably visited them in private so that they could be literal witnesses of him. I miss the days of believing that, but there is just too much evidence to the contrary. Have I lost my faith? Am I now dwindling in unbelief? Yet, how can I be blamed for unbelief when such a thing isn’t even being taught? No one has ever told me to believe the apostles see Christ.
Your question is not a strange one, lots of people have this as a struggle, too. It’s valid and very real. I don’t have an answer for it, but something that I try to do as I determine my belief and faith system is to look at the biblical history. On the prophet level I believe Christianity and Mormonism have robbed the present people of the image of a Prophet. When I look back and read about The Prophets of Old – I find many who never “prophesied”. Yes some had visitations, but even those were often angels or heavenly messengers. Then there are Prophets – Isaac and Jacob, who didn’t always seem to be in tune with revelation. Even Joseph who was sold into Egypt only received revelation about himself – not for the church or the tribe per se. He interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams. Which means the revelations for the land came to pharaoh.
Farther along we read Isaiah, Ezekial and so on, but the fulfillment of those prophecies took time. Likewise very few of them mention a visitation. Just impressions, voices, etc.
The New Testament is just that Testimonies. Or accounts of Christ or connecting to Christ. Yes Paul says he’s interacted with Christ/God on the way to Damascus, but beyond that Paul brings no new news. He is merely a missionary who keeps reminding other believers to hang on.
For me, these insights help me, I too embraced the idea that Christ or God were having face to face meetings with our leaders. It was heartbreaking to consider a different idea – however as I have opened my heart up to a different way I am excited. I find myself letting the whispering of my spirit be more a personal leader. I, for the most part, am less impassioned by our leaders statements.
But I’ve been where you are and I have faith you will find your own healing answers.
I also would suggest that even Joseph very rarely had visitations. Most of his experiences were framed and phrased in terms of visions – like the First VISION. I tend to lean towards your option #1. Take that with what Ann said. Look at all the visions, visitations, and revelations in the Old Testament and categorize them the same way, then look at the number of years that occur between prophets that have those experiences. They are really few and far between in the long scheme. There seems to be an expectation that our time should be different, because we’re in the last dispensation before the Second Coming. But maybe that’s all just our own hubris. I will add one more thing: I did a little personal searching a while ago through our entire scriptural canon, just out of curiosity, to see how many experiences with God were phrased in such a way that they obviously were visitations rather than visions. When I looked closely at the actual wording of the accounts, there were only a handful (and I mean five or less) of experiences that were described unmistakably as physical visitations. All others could be read as visions, instead.
We expect so much of our leaders that simply isn’t consistent with our scriptural accounts throughout history.
If you are interested, the following is from my personal blog, written in May 2012. Point #4 deals with this directly.
http://thingsofmysoul.blogspot.com/2012/05/do-prophets-see-god-face-to-face-and.html Old-Timer wrote:I also would suggest that even Joseph very rarely had visitations. Most of his experiences were framed and phrased in terms of visions – like the First VISION.
I agree. IMO all of Joseph’s experiences were visionary. He was a visionary man. The one hole in my theory is Emma claiming to have felt the outside of the plates while she was cleaning and they were covered with a cloth. I explain that one away because it was in an interview with her grown son after he was the head of the RLDS church. She would have been motivated to protect her husband’s legacy. (In this same interview she denies her husbands involvement in polygamy).
I also think that people tend to have experiences within the range that is acceptable in society at the time. Did you know that speaking in tongues persisted in some RS meetings until the late 1940’s. Why did it stop? IMO because it is no longer socially accepted.
Speaking in tongues was repurposed to mean missionaries learning a foreign language. The spiritual gift was confined by new limits that were placed upon it. Part of Joseph’s message was that god still speaks to man, that he has truths to reveal, and that the heavens are open. After his death the institution appears to have immediately confined or limited that message. Joseph performed a “restoration of all things,” we’ve got what we needed. We can go back to the way things were; the only difference is now we have a few more books to draw from. Thankfully we sill preach personal revelations to keep the window to heaven ajar.
Perhaps that is in line with ancient prophets. A generation where one person rises up to claim communion with god on behalf of all his children that is then followed by periods of relative silence.
Then we get the lord only needs to say things once
repeatedto us if we look for further light and knowledge. nibbler wrote:Part of Joseph’s message was that god still speaks to man, that he has truths to reveal, and that the heavens are open. After his death the institution appears to have immediately confined or limited that message. Joseph performed a “restoration of all things,” we’ve got what we needed. We can go back to the way things were; the only difference is now we have a few more books to draw from. Thankfully we sill preach personal revelations to keep the window to heaven ajar.
I agree with that. Much of that even began in Joseph’s lifetime through the Hyrum Page incident and then later with the temple endowment replacing the sort of individually and collectively breaking the veil to become a kingdom of priests and prophets that Joseph seemed to have been pushing for.
For a really cool discussion of this process fromm charismatic to structured please see the following link:
The Mystical Core of Organized Religion
http://forum.staylds.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4213&hilit=+lava Thanks. I’ll check that out. Great topic. I have spent a great deal of time pondering this very thing over the past few months. Like Ray discovered, I have also realized that in the thousands of years of scriptural accounts we have, God’s direct interaction with man is extremely rare and even more rare are the accounts where it is clear God or Jesus/Jehovah were actually physically present. With that I have also come to realize that zealous leaders in the past wanted us to believe they had direct interaction with God for whatever reason (divine right, fear, whatever). In the present I think there are zealots who continue to wave the flag – mostly out of ignorance (meant nicely). I recall having a discussion with other missionaries (as I recall, a group of about 12) when I was a missionary and almost all of them believed all of the apostles had had an experience where they had actually seen the Savior. (I qualify that because some, like myself, were more quiet and didn’t actually say it.) The reasoning behind that idea was that they couldn’t be “special witnesses” without having done so. So, I agree with what others are saying here – there has been a buildup of unreasonable expectations for the prophets. If we use previous experiences (OT, NT, BoM) as a guide, there were hundreds of years sometimes between direct interaction and even indirect revelation. That does not make TSM any less of a prophet in my view – he holds the office and the keys, but it’s likely he hasn’t been asked to use them. And, we need to remember that prophets do more than prophecy – they also teach, and they have all done that. I also do believe that when the prophet does have a revelation for the church and/or the people of earth, he will clearly state so. I was once flamed on another forum when I said something to this effect and was asked if I thought the prophet needed to say “Thus sayeth the Lord” for it to be revelation, to which I answered yes (more flame). I do believe that – if the Lord is going to speak through his prophet I think both will want us to know it.
Many people claim many things. It does not mean they happened. Even today you can find people that claim just as fervently they have seen Jesus as Joseph ever did. Why do we not give them the same attention. I believe if Jesus does appear to individuals it is most likely a personal thing and not a catalyst to start a church or hand down a set of rules.
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