Elder Jeffrey R. Holland's Remarks to the Harvard Law School

 “Mormonism 101”

March 20, 2012

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland

A version of these remarks was delivered at Harvard Law School during the Latter-day Saint Student Association’s annual Mormonism 101 series.

Thank you for the invitation to be with you today. I am neither a Harvard graduate nor an attorney. I don’t know which of those confessions hurts my standing with you the most, but obviously I am fighting my way out of a difficult hole right at the outset. Furthermore, I am determined to spare you any Harvard-Yale jokes and any attorney jokes. That should make you grateful, but it could also make these remarks brief and more boring. However, I suppose, that is just what you came here expecting from a non-lawyer out of New Haven anyway.

I wish to say at the outset that I am very pleased that you would be holding this seminar or chat session or whatever it is called. I am, of course, impressed because this series is about the faith I cherish. But I am also impressed because it is about religion generally, and you are not embarrassed to acknowledge that, you choose to attend, and you respect the idea of belief. Returning to my academic roots in New England, I am reminded today of—and stand with—a marvelous cleric who had a little parish in Springfield, Massachusetts, about equidistant from New Haven and Cambridge, which seems appropriate. He said 100 years ago:

“The loss of respect for religion is the dry rot of social institutions. The idea of God as the Creator and Father of all mankind is to the moral world, what gravitation is in the natural; it holds everything else together and causes it to revolve around a common center. Take this away and any ultimate significance to life falls apart. There is then no such thing as collective humanity, but only separate molecules of men and women drifting in the universe with no more cohesion and no more meaning than so many grains of sand have meaning for the sea.”[1]

In the western world religion has historically been the basis of civil society as we have known it, and if I am not mistaken, men and women of the law are committed to the best—that is, the most just—civil society possible. So thank you for taking religion seriously. You will not only be better attorneys but you will be closer to the truth in your own personal lives.

Now, you have invited me to speak for a few minutes about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I hope I can tell you something of what we believe and why I have committed my life, my loyalty, and everything I hold dear to that belief.

One hundred and eighty-nine years ago an angel—and if you want to know us, you have to know we believe in God and angels and divine manifestations of all the scriptural kinds—an angel appeared to a 17-year-old boy and told him that “God had a work for [him] to do; and that [his] name should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds, and tongues, . . . that it should be both good and evil spoken of among all people.”[2]

That angelic declaration continues to be fulfilled, for good or ill as prophesied, as various political, social, and cultural—to say nothing of religious—events swirl around The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I can understand that it is a little shocking to have had not one but two Latter-day Saint candidates vying for the presidential nomination of their party, and I confess I did not believe I would live to see the day that yellow cabs in Times Square would be scurrying about with “taxi toppers” reading “See the Book of Mormon.” Of course our quick rejoinder to that has been, “Now you have seen the show, read the book.” And so it goes. But not much of what the press is calling the “Mormon Moment” will have meaning if one doesn’t understand the basic things that make us the religion that we are. So let me start a little nearer the beginning.

In 1820 this young man to whom I have referred, Joseph Smith, desired to know if the true, original church of Jesus Christ was on the earth. Acting on pure faith in response to a single biblical verse which invited any seeker to pray and ask God such questions, this then 14-year-old boy prayed vocally for the first time in his life.[3]

In response to that prayer, what happened next is, to believers like myself, the most important revelatory event for mortals to have witnessed—or to have heard about—since that little band of disciples gathered near Jerusalem to see the resurrected Christ ascend bodily into heaven. In a vision which the young Joseph Smith described as being “above the brightness of the sun,” God the Eternal Father and that same resurrected Jesus Christ appeared to him, in at least partial fulfillment of that promise in the book of Acts in which two angels had said to that earlier group, “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.”[4]

That day is inextricably linked with this day and any meaning my visit on this campus may have for you. There is not time to walk through 190 years of Latter-day Saint history since that epiphany, but suffice it to say that young Joseph Smith’s declaration in 1820 is our declaration today and forever—that there was a true church once in the meridian of time, in which Jesus Christ was the chief cornerstone and the personification of its divinity, with mortal men called as prophets and apostles to form a foundational footing around Him. These apostles, with other teachers and priests, pastors, and members in general constituted a figurative building, a church, which Paul described as being “fitly framed together . . . for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, [and] for the edifying of the body of Christ.”[5] That is our first testimony—of Jesus Christ as the literal Son of God, of the merciful and redeeming gospel He brought from the Father to the earth to share with all of God’s children, and of the church Christ established to be the vehicle for communicating those truths and offering those ordinances.

But our next testimony is that after Christ’s ascension and with the death of those early apostles the church and its divinely ordained succession of priesthood authority was lost, taken, removed from the face of the earth.

So what ensued was a millennium and a half of destroying Paul’s hope that there would be a “unity of the faith, and [a] knowledge of the Son of God, . . . that we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive.”[6] It is commonplace to note that in the Christian world we now see anything but “a unity of faith” or any real Christian cohesiveness that could remotely be called “the building fitly framed together”[7] that would reaffirm “one Lord, one faith, one baptism.”[8]

And so it was in Joseph Smith’s day. This young boy-prophet lamented that his region was “a scene of great confusion and bad feeling . . . priest contending against priest, and convert against convert; so that [any] good feelings . . . were entirely lost in a . . . war of words and tumult of opinions.”[9] “A war of words and tumult of opinions.” That says so much about post-New Testament Christianity.

In response to that confusion, what brings me to you today is not a message of reformation but of restoration—the restoration of that church Christ established by His hand in the meridian of time, and which He has reestablished by His hand in this present time.

Our basic message about Christ’s restored Church and its doctrine is not limited to, but might begin with, the truth that:

• Every man, woman, and child who has ever lived, now lives, or will yet live so long as the earth shall last is a son or daughter of a loving and divine Heavenly Father. He is the God in whose image we were created, which is not surprising in that children are always created in the image of their parents.[10] As the spiritual offspring of God, we are “heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.”[11]

• In order to gain a mortal body and experience moral growth available in no other way, a real Adam and a real Eve chose to leave a paradisiacal setting—Eden, if you will—to learn all that was necessary for children of God to learn, especially about living together in love and realizing that the guidance God would give them is the only answer to the personal and familial, social and political, economic and philosophical problems they would face in mortality.

• Because mistakes would be made in the course of that mortal education—sometimes horrible mistakes, wrenching mistakes, global mistakes—a Savior was provided in such a plan, one who would atone not only for Adam and Eve’s initial transgression (one necessary to bring the human family into mortal existence)[12] but also for every individual transgression made by all those in that human family—the sins and sorrows, the disappointments and despair, the tears and tragedies of every man, woman, and child who would ever live from Adam to the end of the world.

• Such a plan was necessary and such a Savior was required in it because life is eternal. Our hopes and dreams mattered before we came to this earth, and they will most certainly matter after we leave it. If the following sentiment was good enough for a Harvard graduate and professor, it is good enough for me:

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream!

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returns,

Was not spoken of the soul.[13]

The Apostle Paul said it even better: “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.”[14]

• Lastly, this plan, this divine course outlined for us—including the fortunate Fall in Eden and the redemption of Gethsemane and Calvary—is universally inclusive. All are children of the same God, and all are included in His love and His grace. “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”[15] Everyone is covered, though it remains to be seen whether everyone cares. But if there is a failure to respond, it won’t be because God didn’t try and Christ didn’t come. That is at the heart of what I have been introducing to you as the restored gospel.

Now, in light of what I consider that pretty straightforward New Testament theology, one may wonder, “Why do these Mormons stir up such emotions in people, and why are they not considered Christian by some?” Let me conclude with just a few thoughts on that.

We are not considered Christian by some because we are not fourth-century Christians, we are not Nicene Christians, we are not creedal Christians of the brand that arose hundreds of years after Christ. No, when we speak of “restored Christianity” we speak of the Church as it was in its New Testament purity, not as it became when great councils were called to debate and anguish over what it was they really believed. So if one means Greek-influenced, council-convening, philosophy-flavored Christianity of post-apostolic times, we are not that kind of Christian. Peter we know, and Paul we know, but Constantine and Athanasius, Athens and Alexandria we do not know. (Actually, we know them, we just don’t follow them.) 

Thus, we teach that:

• God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, are separate and distinct beings with glorified bodies of flesh and bone. As such, we stand with the historical position that “the formal doctrine of the Trinity as it was defined by the great church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries is not to be found in the [New Testament].”[16] We take Christ literally at His word—that He “came down from heaven, not to do [his] own will, but the will of him that sent [him].”[17] Of His antagonists, He said they have “hated both me and my Father.”[18] These, along with scores of other references, including His pleading prayers, make clear Jesus’s physical separation from His Father. However, having affirmed the point of Their separate and distinct physical nature, we declare unequivocally that They were indeed “one” in every other conceivable way—in mind and deed, in will and wish and hope, in faith and purpose and intent and love. They are most assuredly much more alike than They are different in all the ways I have just said, but They are separate and distinct beings as all fathers and sons are. In this matter we differ from traditional creedal Christianity but agree with the New Testament.

• We also differ with fourth and fifth century Christianity by declaring that the scriptural canon is not closed, that the heavens are open with revelatory experience, and that God meant what He said when He promised Moses, “My works are without end, and . . . my words . . . never cease.”[19] We believe that God loves all His children and that He would never leave them for long without the instrumentality of prophets and apostles, authorized agents of His guidance and direction. The Book of Mormon and other canonized scripture, as well as the role of living oracles, witnesses to the fact that God continues to speak. We agree enthusiastically with the insightful Protestant scholar who inquired, “On what biblical or historical grounds has the inspiration of God been limited to the written documents that the church now calls its Bible? . . . If the Spirit inspired only the written documents of the first century, does that mean that the same Spirit does not speak today . . . about matters that are of significant concern?”[20]

• Lastly, for today, we are unique in the modern Christian world regarding one matter which a prophet and president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints called our “most distinguishing feature.”[21] That is, divine priesthood authority to provide the saving sacraments—the ordinances—of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The holy priesthood, which has been restored to the earth by those who held it anciently, signals the return of divine authorization. It is different from all other man-made powers and authorities on the face of the earth. Without it there could be a church in name only, and it would be a church lacking in authority to administer in the things of God. This restoration of priesthood authority eases centuries of anguish among those who knew certain ordinances and sacraments were essential but lived with the doubt as to who had the right to administer them. Breaking ecclesiastically with his more famous brother John over the latter’s decision to ordain without any divine authority to do so, Charles Wesley wrote:

How easily are bishops made

By man or woman’s whim:

Wesley his hands on Coke hath laid,

But who laid hands on him?[22]

In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints we can answer the question of “who laid hands on him” all the way back to Christ Himself. The return of such authority is truly “the most distinguishing feature” of our faith.

Thank you for your courteous attendance. I will be pleased to devote the remaining time to your questions. I leave my love, my witness, and a personal blessing on every one of you for whatever righteous need you may have, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.