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tect her from her children,” some Church leaders have told
me. I thought about the times I have ached for Heavenly
Mother, those desperate times in my life when I wished for
the veil to part so that I could be held against her and sob
into her chest and have her nourish me. I looked at my own
newborn son, and I decided I could not bear any longer to
have a veil placed between us.
ALISA
Midvale, Utah
S c r i p t u re n o t e s
In this regular column, Michael Vinson, a master’s graduate of the
Divinity School of the University of Cambridge and a frequent
devotional speaker at Sunstone symposiums, delves into personal and
scholarly aspects of scripture.
HOW MUCH DOES JESUS CARE
ABOUT DOCTRINAL PURITY?
. . . And I shall bring to light the true points of my doctrine,
yea, and the only doctrine which is in me. And
this I do that I may establish my gospel, that there may
not be so much contention; yea, Satan doth stir up the
hearts of the people to contention concerning the points
of my doctrine; and in these things they do err, for they
do wrest the scriptures and do not understand them.
—D&C 10:62–63
ONE OF MY EARLIEST EXPERIENCES IN “BIBLE
bashing” came while I was serving as a
stake missionary in California and
waiting for my own mission call. I had gone out
with the elders to visit an investigator, who had
invited a surprise visitor—the leading anti-
Mormon minister in our little community.
Almost immediately, the Reverend and the missionaries
began arguing about points of doctrine
while I sat there with just a year of Rick’s College
religion classes behind me and nothing to add to
any arguments. The voices became louder, and I
could feel temperatures rising in the room. I am
sure the investigator was sorry to be there as
well. After nearly an hour of arguing, there was a
pause and I finally spoke up. I’ll get to what I
said in a moment.
I wish I could say I learned from that experience,
but a little scriptural knowledge and a lot
of missionary zeal is a dangerous combination,
and a year later, while on my mission in Bolivia,
I had my own run-in with a minister who had
been invited over by our investigator.
As I reflect back on these Bible-bashing experiences,
they now seem to me not so different
from all other arguments about scriptural
meaning and doctrine, including those going on within the
Church today. I am thinking especially here of members
who have been punished by or threatened with excommunication
over theological or doctrinal issues. Instead of
bashing over points of scripture—though that can certainly
happen in Sunday School—these confrontations take place
in the privacy of a stake high council room and are known
today as “Church Disciplinary Councils” (though in classic
Orwellian double-speak, they were once called “courts of
love”). In the Church’s purge of intellectuals in the early
1990s—one that to some extent still continues—one of the
main justifications for the excommunications was that
these persons’ writings and lectures could contaminate the
“pure” doctrine of the Church as taught in classes and
meetings. Clearly some Church leaders have felt that doctrinal
purity is an issue that should be pressed. Indeed, a recent
edition of the Church Handbook of Instructions lists
keeping the Church “pure” as adequate reason for excommunication.
Teaching “false doctrine” is also mentioned as
an excommunicable offense.
But I believe there is something inherently dangerous for
the long-term health of religious institutions that perpetrate
this point of view. First, because all leaders are human, there
is not any earthly institution—”true church” or otherwise—
that does not occasionally make mistakes that might be considered
doctrinal. For instance, there are few Church leaders
today who are willing to still stand up and say that the denial
of priesthood blessings to blacks was truly the word and will
of the Lord. Nevertheless, before the 1978 priesthood revelation
in 1978, some Latter-day Saints were threatened with or
received Church discipline for advocating the eradication of
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