Michael Haycock has a bachelor’s from Yale and a master’s in religion from Claremont Graduate University. He currently serves as the Ecumenical/Christian Life Coordinator at Georgetown. Views are, of course, his own.
LDS theology is like the double helix of DNA, unzipped: it has two parallel strands that circle around each other, but which rarely connect.
On one strand rests the Meetinghouse, with much of the Christianity we received through scripture ancient and modern and which we share with much of Christendom.
On the other is the Temple, the divine anthropology of the eternal family, and eternal progression, which we hold unique among Christian faiths. [1]
I am convinced that much of the theological friction within the LDS Church is born of the gaps between these two theological strands, amplified by official near-silence on how to bind them together.
For instance, to emphasize our Christianity, Church leadership has excised “Mormon” from official vocabulary and highlighted “Jesus Christ” in the name of the Church. Yet drawing from much of our rhetoric and current social policy focus, some members joke that we should be called the “Church of the Family of Latter-day Saints.”
The most common depiction of the Plan of Salvation does not feature Jesus Christ.
When it does, Christ is seldom integrated structurally into the story of the progressing soul. He’s incidental, a bridge between fallen mortality and risen immortality. The salvation story is the individual soul’s; Christ just helps the soul along.
Nowhere does this Plan of Salvation depict the family. We speak of “saving ordinances,” the highest of which require temple marriage, yet attribute our salvation to Jesus alone. We then explain that salvation is a personal matter while exaltation is a familial one. But we never specify whether Jesus, supposedly the fulcrum in all human soteriology, plays a different role for exaltation than he already does for salvation. The Church has increased its number of references to “Heavenly Parents,” but it never ties that narrative to Christ. We emphasize the grace of a perfect Savior who fulfilled all righteousness, but whose wife and children are never mentioned.
* * *
Visitors to our meetinghouses are often underwhelmed by the mundanity of what they find there: utilitarian design aesthetics; worship services dominated by member-prepared talks and old-style hymns; and a variant of communion without even wine. The ordinances performed in meetinghouses (and, indeed, in public) all have clear genealogies to the rituals performed by New Testament Christians. In addition to the Lord’s Supper, we perform baptisms, laying on of hands (for the Holy Ghost, health, blessings, and so forth), improvised prayer, and ordination to the priesthood (as an order for administration of congregations and ordinances). In addition to being broadly recognizable to other Christians, these rites posit a particular relationship between humans and God: adopted children, adoptive parent. It is this sort of kinship King Benjamin discusses when he speaks of individuals becoming instead of being begotten sons and daughters of God. Accordingly, among church members we call each other “brother” and “sister.”
(That said, we orient our worship less around Jesus than around his role as Christ: we order neither the spaces of our churches nor the times of our worship around events in the life of Jesus Christ. Worship does not vary in form even for Easter, and the central focus of our chapels is the pulpit, not the Sacrament table. Contrast this with many other Christian churches, whose buildings are designed in their shape and interiors to speak of the life of Christ and His servants and whose liturgical years are organized around the major events in Jesus’s life and in the early Church.)
By contrast, the temple revolves around marital and lineal relationships as constituted on Earth and extrapolated, via deification, into the heavens. The ordinances unique to the temple ordinances are at most hinted at in Biblical language but nowhere outlined, and they are not shared by any traditional Christian church. In them, Christ is a character and a presence, but not the central figure. The ordinances tell the story not of individual Christians or of Jesus, but of Adam and Eve. The ordinance participants are gender-segregated, specifically arranged into heterosexual couples and embedded in a cosmological story. Men and women are admitted into God’s presence singly; they then proceed to a sealing room to receive God’s ratification of their union.
In the temple, the priesthood becomes an apprenticeship in godhood instead of a administrative structure. The axis of each room is an altar at which couples (and sometimes their children) kneel and pray. In temple ordinances, we are not separate beings that God adopts as children; we are preexisting beings of his species and lineage, learning how to live up to our eternal, natural birthright and build the kingdom of God, including through reproduction. True, we repeat in the temple most of the rituals performed outside it, but with an eye to lineage. Since 1894, we do proxy ordinances for our ancestors. The temple is the center of Zion, the New Jerusalem, but it’s closed on Sunday, the Lord’s Day.
(Patriarchal blessings also fit within the temple category: they are unique among Christian churches to the LDS tradition, are delivered by a man identified with a lineal term, and are kept mostly confidential.)
* * *
In the past, LDS authorities have tried to bridge the gaps between these two theological strands. Polygamist cosmology, with the Law of Adoption, featured hierarchical heavens in which Heavenly Father and Jesus participated in the accumulation of wives and children. Brigham Young attempted to wedge Adam more integrally into the story of humankind’s salvation (via so-called “Adam-God” theology, discarded and disavowed after Young’s death). Temples and their ordinances were less restricted in their purposes — you would never hear of a rebaptism for health nowadays.
Today, however, the relationship between Jesus Christ’s atonement and families is more tenuous. Preach My Gospel and “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” present the relationship as an instrumental one: “The Gospel Blesses Families” by teaching them to be better people by following God’s commandments and by making it possible for people to return to God’s presence.
On my mission, I reworked the Plan of Salvation visual aid so that it would make visually obvious what exactly was Jesus’s role in the “story of the soul” (see image, in which Jesus lowers the ladder of the Gospel down to folks dwelling in sin). But official references don’t go further, or explain how Jesus makes family exaltation possible on top of individual salvation; it often seems like family exaltation is just the byproduct of saved individuals having received an extra ordinance, sealing.
Focusing on Jesus doesn’t help us understand either why “marriage between man and woman is essential to God’s eternal plan” [2] or any differences between the sexes. Indeed, we read that there is “no male or female … in the Lord.” (Galatians 3:28). It doesn’t help us understand the differences between exaltation and salvation, and why we should self-evidently prefer the former (besides the mere fact that it’s “higher”). It doesn’t help us understand the role of reproduction and childrearing in the eternities. It doesn’t even explain why keeping families together is important.
And vice versa: it’s very hard to relate discussions of the structure of families to the Son of God, who deflected praise of his mother (Luke 11:27), seemingly disavowed his mother and brothers (Matthew 12:48-50), said that he would pit family members against each other (Matthew 10:34-37), and assigned a disciple as a son to his own mother (John 19:25-29).
In short: if we want to talk about families and Jesus, we need to do some serious work linking them together. We need to make the marriage of Temple and Meetinghouse more than an inherited tradition, the architectural instantiations of assimilation and retrenchment. It must be the living, bountiful theological soil in which we can plant our individual and communal selves. Until we do that, we’re open to valid critique from both sides. And until we do that, we will lose those for whom the unresolved tension grows too great.
—notes—
[1] Except for Mormon fundamentalists.
[2] No matter how many times General Authorities quote Jesus quoting Genesis about a man leaving his father and mother and cleaving unto his wife.