What We Both Believe

Before I raise a single hard question, I want to spend a little while on the ground we already share. Not as a tactic — I mean that. If the only reason a person names your good qualities is to soften you up for the blow that comes next, you can usually feel it, and you’d be right to close the letter. So let me be plain: what follows is true, and I’d write it whether or not there were a next chapter.

You love Jesus. I’ve watched it. I’ve heard the way His name changes in your mouth when you say it in prayer versus when you say it in conversation — a small drop in the voice, a kind of reverence that can’t be faked. You believe He is the Christ, the Son of God, that He suffered for the sins of the world and rose again on the third day. I believe that too. When you kneel with your children at night, or bow your head over a plate of food, or pull the car over because a friend is in crisis and needs someone to pray them through it, you and I are doing the same thing, to the same Lord, and He hears us both.

You take scripture seriously. That’s rarer than you might think. Plenty of people who call themselves religious never actually open the book — they carry a vague warmth toward it and let it sit on a shelf. You don’t. You read. You mark passages. You bring verses to bear on ordinary decisions, and you raise children who can find their way around a page of text before they can drive. The reverence you have for the written word of God is one of the things I admire most about your people, and it’s the very reason I think this letter has any hope of being useful to you. A person who won’t read can’t be reached by reading. You can.

You are morally serious in a way the world is quietly starving for. You keep your promises. You show up with a casserole and a truck and a Saturday when someone in your ward is moving or grieving or sick. You believe that how a man treats his wife, and how a woman raises her children, and how both of them handle money and time and their own appetites, are matters that God actually cares about. You believe there is such a thing as right and wrong and that it isn’t up for a vote. I am not going to pretend that’s a small thing or a common thing. It isn’t. It’s a great deal of what’s good in this country, and it walks around wearing your name badge.

So please hear me: none of that is on trial in this letter. I’m not here to tell you your love of Christ is counterfeit or your family is a performance. It isn’t. When we read John 3:16John 3:16 (KJV) — For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life., we are reading the same words and meaning the same thing by them. That common ground is real, and I’m standing on it with you right now, on purpose, before I take a single step further.

Now let me show you why that common ground is enough to build the entire letter on.

Among your Articles of Faith — the thirteen statements Joseph Smith wrote to summarize what Latter-day Saints believe, and which your Church canonizes in the Pearl of Great Price — there is one that quietly hands me everything I need. Here it is, word for word:

Read that first clause again slowly, because it is the hinge the whole letter turns on. We believe the Bible to be the word of God. Not a good book. Not a useful book. Not a book that was true once and isn’t anymore. The word of God. That is your Church’s official position, printed in your own scripture, and it means that when I open a Bible in front of you, I am not opening a stranger’s book — I am opening yours.

And it’s more specific than that. The Bible your Church uses in English is not some rival translation you’d be right to distrust. It is the King James Version. Your Church published its own edition of it in 1979, with its own footnotes and cross-references and study helps woven right into the pages, and its own official guidance is that “in English, that is the King James Version” members are to use in classes and meetings. So the exact Bible I’m going to quote to you — King James English, the same wording you’d hear read from a pulpit in your own ward on Sunday — is scripture your Church has already handed you and told you to trust.

That changes what kind of conversation you and I can have. I don’t have to persuade you that the Bible is God’s word; you already confess it. I don’t have to sell you on a translation; you already carry the one I’ll be using. Every Bible verse in every chapter that follows is a verse you already accept as the word of God, in the very edition your own Church authorizes. There is no daylight between us on the source. None.

Which leaves exactly one live question — and, to your Church’s credit, Article 8 names it right out loud. As far as it is translated correctly. That clause is the single door left open. It doesn’t say the Bible is unreliable; it says the Bible is the word of God, with a caution attached about places where the translation might have gone wrong along the way. Fair enough. That is a real question, and it deserves a real answer instead of a shrug. So the very next chapter takes it head-on: which parts, exactly, are supposed to be mistranslated — how do we know — and what happens to the verses in this letter when we put that claim under the light? I’m not going to dodge it. I’m going to walk straight into it with you.

But notice what has quietly happened here. To read the rest of this letter, you do not have to trust me, or my church, or any book I might carry. You only have to trust the book you already believe is the word of God.

So here is my method: I will never ask you to trust my church’s books. I’ll only ask you to read yours.

Your friend, Brock