Brigham Young:
The gospel of Jesus Christ embraces all truth.
All truth is for the salvation of the children of men—for the benefit and learning—for their furtherance in the principles of divine knowledge; and divine knowledge is any matter of fact—truth; and all truth pertains to divinity (DBY, 11).
Be willing to receive the truth, let it come from whom it may; no difference, not a particle. Just as soon receive the Gospel from Joseph Smith as from Peter, who lived in the days of Jesus. Receive it from one man as soon as another. If God has called an individual and sent him to preach the Gospel that is enough for me to know; it is no matter who it is, all I want is to know the truth (DBY, 11).
“Mormonism,” so-called, embraces every principle pertaining to life and salvation, for time and eternity. No matter who has it. If the infidel has got truth it belongs to “Mormonism.” The truth and sound doctrine possessed by the sectarian world, and they have a great deal, all belong to this Church. As for their morality, many of them are, morally, just as good as we are. All that is good, lovely, and praiseworthy belongs to this Church and Kingdom. “Mormonism” includes all truth. There is no truth but what belongs to the Gospel.(Brigham Young is a controversial figure, and the Church has distanced itself from some of his pronouncements. This quote, however, comes from the official Church manual Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Brigham Young and can be considered the position of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
I think there's a lot to explore with the idea of what truth is, who has it, and what that means. To prevent this essay from spiraling too far afield, I'm going to set down some prima facie assumptions off of which I'm working. Each assumption will be dealt with in a separate essay. I recognize that there could be more assumptions, as well as arguments against these particular ones. I encourage whoever feels that way to write her own essay about it.
- First assumption: Truth is out there and it is knowable, though not in its fullest manifestation.
- Second assumption: The pathways to understanding Truth are legion.
- Third assumption: We have a duty to learn as much Truth as possible.
First Assumption
Truth is out there and it is knowable, though not in its fullest manifestation. Unsurprisingly, I--a theist and a Mormon--make the claim that there is Truth "out there" but we "see through a glass, darkly" (1 Corinthians 13:12), meaning that the deeper, fuller expressions of Truth are still beyond us. This shouldn't be a surprise, as the process of scientific discovery continues to erode old assumptions, verify new hypotheses, and refines our understanding of almost every facet of our reality. If you've read my earlier argument against Creationism, you'll know that I "believe"* in science and rely on its observations, projections, and creations easily.
What do I mean by "out there"? In a broad sense, there are things beyond our current ken that exist but we haven't discovered. Other planets, other life, other understandings of the universe. But I also mean it internally; a century ago, the concept of PTSD was derided and men who suffered from shell shock were mocked, electrocuted, and in other ways shamed to return to the hell of the trenches. Our understanding of the human mind has changed over the course of a hundred years, and it's certain that such an understanding will continue to improve as the decades slough away. "There's more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," Hamlet says to his friend (1.5), and he's not wrong. The full comprehension that Truth would necessarily embrace is not in humankind, but its continued existence puts it somewhere outside of us. That's enough of an "out there" for me.
But the idea that there is more Truth hanging out is part of what surprises and encourages me about the Brigham Young quote. The source of Truth is, in some aspects, irrelevant because the ultimate source is God. But God doesn't work through monopolies. Even His gifts are dispersed ("to one is given...", see 1 Corinthians 12, as well as this list), showered over the entirety of the planet. To say that Truth comes from God is accurate but requires additional application.
To return to the quote, Brigham Young says that Mormonism "embraces every principle pertaining to life and salvation, for time and eternity. No matter who has it. If the infidel has got truth it belongs to 'Mormonism.'" Okay, sure, the word "infidel" is loaded and borderline racist and certainly a relic of the nineteenth century, but this idea is fundamental to any religion, yet is hardly heard. Exclusive truth claims are the bread and butter of every major religious group, particularly among the Abrahamic traditions.
As a Mormon, I believe (there's that word again) the Church is true, but that doesn't mean that I don't see Truth in other religions. This is likely where the impulse for solidarity with other Christians comes from, despite having enough radical theology to put Mormonism in its own category. There's a lot of Truth in Taoism, for example, and heaping helpings of it in Islam. Judaism is the foundation off of which Christianity and Mormonism have built their respective traditions, with Islam responding as much to as it does against Judaism. (There's a reason Jews and Christians are called "people of the book" in Islam.)
What I think every philosophy and religion--most particularly my own--suffers from is a lack of humility about what we've learned. In the Mormon tradition, our ninth Article of Faith says this: "We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God." It doesn't say that it will be revealed exclusively through the Church, though that's sometimes the case. The Wright brothers weren't Mormons, is what I'm getting at. There are plenty of things that the world has seen, done, created, and understood that operated independently of Mormon theology.
The problem with monopolistic alethiology is that it can't be sustained without the input of others. Now, President Young's approach is to proactively seize the Truth generated by outside sources, claiming them as Truth and, as a natural consequence of Mormonism's truth-claims, de facto Mormonism. This is an interesting rhetorical maneuver, but I don't think it should be a Mormonic approach. Any religion claiming to have Truth must needs be in the same position. Truth, in its abstract and in its application, has to be deeply connected with all other aspects of itself. If any religion claims to have Truth, that means that anywhere there is Truth, there is that religion.
I'm not saying that all religions teach the same thing, nor that they're all teaching Truth, or that they contain salvific power. Instead, I'm saying that there are many important pieces of Truth that are manifest throughout everything--not just religions. It's why, for example, Mormons ought to "believe" in climate change: It's a truth, and must therefore be incorporated into the religion.
So how do we get to additional Truth if it's not monopolized? That's the assumption in the second essay.
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* Despite this essay being, in part, epistemological, I'm not going to dive into the weeds of "belief" and its nuances. Sorry.