Follower of Truth)

Yesterday I spoke about how each of us not only require faith that God is real, but that we are following Him in the right way. Personally, I do believe in receiving spiritual witnesses from God, and I have received them myself, but even those still leave me in a place of faith and trust, not perfect knowledge.

In the end, this means that I have to accept that I could be wrong. I could be in the right church, but wrong in my conception of it. Or I could be in the right family of faith, Christianity, but wrong in the specific denomination I attend. Or I could be right about there being a God, but wrong about following Christ. Or I could be wrong about there even being a God. All of these are possible. At each deeper level, I feel more certain of my belief. I feel so certain of many of them that it would take a divine intervention to unseat me…but even so, I could still be wrong.

When it comes to the church that I am baptized in, the leaders that I listen to, the spiritual rituals that I observe, and the standard of life I try to live, I do these things because I think they are right and I am trying to follow the Truth. My first and foremost commitment is to the Truth, and I am trying to follow it wherever it leads me. It has led me to change some aspects of my discipleship, and it has reinforced others, and I expect it to continue to do so until I meet it face-to-face.

Willingness to Change)

I frankly do not believe that it is the same with many who come to accuse me of false beliefs. In conversations with them I have tried to express this shared foundation of uncertainty, the fact that both of us are operating on faith, the mutual possibility of being wrong, and the humility with which we should therefore approach one another…only to have them refuse to meet me on this common ground. They express that they know their creeds are divinely authored. They know their interpretations are correct. They know that I am wrong and going to hell.

I found this unjustifiable certainty very confusing, and I described a theoretical to make sure I was understanding them correctly: “Let’s suppose you and I both die tomorrow, and we meet at the gates to heaven, and Jesus is there to welcome us, and he informs me that I was misguided in my faith. He says that I should have belonged to your church all along and not the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In this situation, I genuinely believe that I would accept his word. I would accept your position as being the correct one and mine as being wrong. What’s more, I would accept whatever judgment Christ has for me given that I went astray. Whatever his judgment is, it is, by definition, just and right. Or, if I would not be so gracious in correction, then I here admit it would be because I was proud, and arrogant, and more in love with my own conceptions than with my Savior.” And then, having given this theoretical and my personal feelings about it, my follow-up question to the person attacking my faith is very simple: “What about for you if the situation was reversed? If Jesus told you that you were wrong, would you renounce your faith and accept ‘Mormonism?'”

What I found very telling was how uncomfortable everyone became when I asked this question. They would not give me straight answers. They would tell me that what I was asking was a logical impossibility, and therefore pointless to engage with. They would say that Mormonism is false as an absolute fact, and that therefore the mental exercise was absurd. They would tell me that in my half of the theoretical it would be too late for me to accept the true faith after I had died, focusing on that aspect rather than addressing their half of the theoretical. One way or another, they simply would not entertain the possibility of receiving correction in their faith, even as a thought experiment. They were closed-minded and closed-hearted, and there really was no point in continuing a conversation with them.

A healthy dialogue of differences can only be had between two people who are both seeking the truth. But to be a seeker of truth, by definition, means not yet having it fully. When one of the people in the conversation is not a seeker, when they insist upon already being the haver and the other person being the not-haver, then they hold a fundamental air of superiority and have closed themselves to one direction of dialogue only: them telling you what is right, and you accepting it or staying wrong. There can be no back-and-forth, no mutual understanding, no lifting each other to greater clarity. This is a pattern of domineering and abuse, and it is not how Christ meant for us to reason with one another. Once a person shows that they will insist on such a dynamic, I will not continue to participate any further. I insist on better than “perfect” knowers. I insist on flawed seekers of truth.