Continuing from LDS Living Magazine and Kate Holbrook’s article: For the previous post, click. . . A Harvest of Truth II). (For the first post of this series click A Harvest of Truth)
The same is true of the truth we treasure in the Church. We cherish the exhilarating, expansive gospel precepts revealed by Joseph Smith, contained in Restoration scripture and elaborated by God’s continuing revelation to modern prophets. The restoration of the Priesthood, God’s power on earth, and His continuing revelation to prophets are truths worthy of celebration. Historical sources convince me that God’s revelation to individuals has continued and this restored gospel has made that experience available to people all over the globe. But the homegrown truths need not blind us to the beneficial aspects of our traditions. When Latter-day Saints are tempted to discount the value and beauty of other faiths, they ignore another of our home-grown truths, the 13th Article of Faith: “If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.” Rather than downplaying the spiritual benefit of other churches, a more useful approach is to acknowledge God’s work in many faith communities and then to magnify the goodness of the tradition we’ve chosen. For Latter-day Saints, that means both appreciating what is virtuous, lovely and praiseworthy in other traditions and really focusing on what our Church has to offer. We acknowledge the good here, and we are grateful for it. We do the valuable work to which our Church calls us. We bring the good we find elsewhere into our spiritual practice here. We add wheat to wheat and we find we have enough—and enough to spare.
We work toward the time when all will be nourished in body and mind.
Brigham Young said, “[The Church] embraces every science on earth. Every knowledge imparted to men is from God and is within our religion. There is no truth that has ever been revealed that we do not believe, at the same time, when people are disposed to point out errors . . . we are willing to acknowledge that we have errors.” 4 What does “the true Church” seem to bring to Brigham Young in this quotation? I hear him saying that there is space in the Church for whatever genuine scientific or religious discoveries come along. There is truth everywhere, and the Church will try to function as a collection house for it all. I also hear him saying that the Church will have errors. We should be open to correction and new information. There’s real spiritual confidence in this quotation, the kind of confidence that stands behind a bold statement such as “There is a true Church, and this is it.” And there’s also the humility that blooms from spiritual confidence: “There’s a truest Church and, even so, we bumbling human beings aren’t going to get everything right. Also, our members and our leaders are not going to be the sole source of truth. God will reveal truth elsewhere and we are still beholden to that truth, even though it doesn’t come from us.” Those sentiments feel awfully modern to me, but they coincide with what I think Brigham Young intended to convey.
The Church is true because it empowers its members to seek and find all truth that is “virtuous, lovely, of good report or praiseworthy,” whatever its origin. The Church is a storehouse of truth, and its doors are propped open to give and receive all true things and expel error. We add wheat to wheat, light to light and we work toward the time when all will be nourished in body and mind. ~Kate Holbrook, (deceased) A Harvest of Truth (Salt Lake City: LDS Living magazine, July/August 2023), 23-25
