Don't you ever wonder if it isn't all just made up?

Put another way, do I experience crises of faith?

Yes, I do. Occasionally. But not very often.

One of the crises of faith I have experienced has to do with academic scholarship in the church. On occasion I have come across mediocre work by LDS scholars that attempted to shoehorn history in to a pro-LDS view, or to explain it away in a disingenuous manner. I remember one such work specifically; it was a text by a prominent BYU professor that set out to prove the events of the restoration using the prophetic texts of the book of Isaiah. While there can be no doubt that certain portions of the text point to events like the period we refer to as the restoration, there are some parts where he seemed to stretch some ideas pretty thinly, and twist them to the breaking point.

I do not say this to cast aspersions on BYU scholars. I think they are largely well-intentioned, and I don’t doubt that their credentials far outweigh my own. I have seen some truly well-researched and inspired defenses of our doctrine come out of the Neal A Maxwell Institute at BYU (formerly known as FARMS). But I have also seen some clunkers.

One thing that I am grateful for is that the internet has made these debates so much more accessible. Unfortunately, especially in the hands of young, untrained minds, these debates can also be dangerous. For example, when a mediocre piece of LDS scholarship is pulled apart by a well-credentialed and sometimes highly intelligent opponent, it can lead to a weakening of faith. In a broader example, popular, well-spoken cosmologists have made more than a few disciples for atheism, marching under the banner of science (or, at least, the banner of theoretical physics, which ironically borders in places on being a religion itself).

Occasionally we are accused of allowing faith to overcome that which is rational. When we cannot explain something, we file it in the mental cabinet of unexplained problems next to ‘supernatural’, and forget about it. “Blind faith”, they call it. I take issue with this. For some problems there is not enough evidence yet to make a decision. Certainly the current evidence may point us in a different direction, but unlike constitutionally-derived criminal rights, I do not believe that religion requires a ‘speedy trial’ of ideas.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” In my view, opposing ideas do not have to inhibit the development of real faith. Quite the contrary; they are necessary to the process. The ability to exercise discipline, to bear a burden, to achieve a high goal, depends on our ability to withstand challenges over an extended period of time.

And then, in the case of gospel truths, we overcome all. Not only do those challenges eventually become the substance and outcome of our faith, but they become the fuel for withstanding future challenges. Remember pre-columbian horses and elephants? The church took an enormous amount of academic mocking for that claim in the Book of Mormon… and then when they were discovered the critics were more than silenced. Those who believe that today’s scientific “facts” are final and cannot be turned upside down are naïve or ignorant of history.

One example that troubled me at one time was our assertion that we believed in the “same organization that existed in the primitive church”. Not only were there titles listed in that Article of Faith that I did not believe existed in our church, my readings and understanding of the early Christian (Catholic) church seemed to not match up in many places. After struggling with it for some time, I submitted it to revelation, received a confirmation that the modern LDS church was in fact the order that Jesus Christ intended, and forgot about it. I reconciled it in my mind in part by recognizing that certain aspects of the church are programmatic and not doctrinal, and that some things do evolve; even in my own lifetime I can remember when there were Seventies ordained at the Stake level, and I can remember when Regional Representatives instead of Area Authority Seventies provided administrative leadership at the local level.

Recently, I’ve begun opening up some of those things again. Of course I haven’t solved everything (there are many things I’d like to learn and understand and reconcile in my mind). But I felt it was time to address some of these academically. Now, I have not even begun to dig deeply and I have already uncovered striking similarities that exist between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the primitive Apostolic church. Not only do they reconcile the church I know with the church that Christ established in his ministry, but they provide ample evidence that Joseph Smith was in fact working by revelation, because he did not have access to what I have today.

Access, through electronic publications and more widely, cheaply available texts, is only one of the things that has changed to make this transformation possible for me. The existence of some texts is also different; from the time of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls until the early 1990s (when I was in High School and College) those texts were not available publicly at all. The gnostic texts from the Nag Hammadi library were not available in translation until the 70s, and now scans of the actual Coptic texts are even available freely. Additionally, in the intervening years my understanding of language and history has changed. I can read a little Greek and a little Latin, and my fluency in the English and Spanish languages allows me to see the different possibilities that result from translation. And my understanding of the Church itself has changed dramatically as I have spent time much time in the Temple, served in higher callings and had access to some of the great leaders of the church, and as my reading has matured my perspective of church history.

What amazes me about this process is not that the church has been proven true. I already have a testimony – given by the Spirit and confirmed by research – of that fact. What amazes me is what the process of holding those ideas has done for me spiritually and emotionally. Holding those ideas over time has strengthened my resolve, tempered my emotions, and given me patience (a virtue that I had not ever planned on developing).

I am grateful for those things, not because they help me reconcile sterile academic questions in my mind, but because of their impact on my life. We don’t choose patient faithful endurance just so that we can determine whether or not the calling of “Evangelist” has equivalents in the primitive and modern church. We choose it so that we enjoy all of the blessings of fidelity and reap the benefits of faith and integrity in our marriages and children and work and community. My witness is that those blessings are real.