Chapter 6

What Faith Is Not

I really do want to know: Whatever happened to faith? Whatever happened to our ability to be patient in receiving answers, in assuming the best about our Church, its leaders, our scriptures, and our doctrines? We touched upon this question to some extent when we spoke of the significant, even cataclysmic changes that have taken place in our world in the past half century. The changes about which we have spoken are not merely scientific or technological changes, although such developments certainly alter our way of life. They are perspective, worldview—lenses through which we interpret life, death, why we are here, divine intervention, and the miraculous.

I might have posed the question differently: What happens when faith begins to wane in the hearts of men and women, when basic metaphysical beliefs begin to erode among earth’s inhabitants? I suppose the answer would be, You have a world like our world today! So what kind of a world do we live in, at least as pertaining to faith?

These Are Not Faith

One approach to deciding what faith is, and why it is becoming so scarce in our world, is to first explore what it is not.

• Faith is not gullibility or falling for anything. Faithless people are sometimes quite critical of those who possess what they do not. They assume that people who live their lives by faith are naïve, easily swayed, and simple-minded. That is not faith. A faithful person is a thinking being, one who can judge, assess, and reason, one who can distinguish clearly between good and evil, light and darkness, right and wrong. A faithful person does not fall prey to either the foolish or the perverse. Faith can be exercised only in that which is true. President N. Eldon Tanner explained that faith “will avail us nothing unless it is based on true principles. This is illustrated in a story I have told before about the meeting of the Indians with the Europeans when they first began their explorations in the New World. The Indians were amazed at the power and explosive qualities of gunpowder and asked many questions about how it was produced. Taking advantage of the ignorance of [these people] and seeing an opportunity to increase their wealth through deception, the Europeans told them it came from the seed of a plant. The Indians believed them and purchased some seed in exchange for gold. They carefully planted the seed and watched it grow, but of course they did not get any gunpowder. No matter how sincere one’s belief may be in an error, it will not change the error into truth.”1

• Faith is neither weakness nor ignorance. True faith is anything but weak. The early Brethren of this dispensation were, in fact, taught that faith is a principle of power, the same power by which God created the worlds. Further, “the principle of power which existed in the bosom of God, by which the worlds were framed, was faith; and . . . it is by reason of this principle of power existing in the Deity, that all created things exist.”2

Nor is faith the opposite of knowledge. A certain level of knowledge and understanding is needed before an individual can exercise faith. The School of the Elders learned, for example, that in order to exercise faith in God unto life and salvation, a person must (1) believe there is a God; (2) have a correct understanding of the character, perfections, and attributes of that divine Being; and (3) possess an actual knowledge that the course in life that he or she is pursuing is according to the will of God.3

“Faith is the child of knowledge,” Elder Bruce R. McConkie wrote. “It is reserved for those only who first have knowledge; there neither is nor can be any faith until there is knowledge. No one can have faith in a God of whom he knows nothing. Faith is founded on truth; it is the offspring of truth; it can never exist alone and apart from the truth.”4

• Faith is not blind. In fact, those with faith are frequently able to see and discern things that a faithless person could never perceive. That is why some say believing is seeing, not the reverse. Nor are Latter-day Saints, who are presided over by prophets, seers, and revelators, expected to follow their leaders like blind sheep. President Harold B. Lee said, paraphrasing Brigham Young: “The greatest fear I have is that the people of this Church will accept what we say as the will of the Lord without first praying about it and getting the witness within their own hearts that what we say is the word of the Lord.”5 One of the great strengths of the Church is that there are millions of people throughout the world who exercise bold, intelligent obedience.

Adam and Eve were commanded to “offer the firstlings of their flocks, for an offering unto the Lord. And Adam was obedient unto the commandments of the Lord.” The Mosaic account indicates that “after many days” an angel appeared to our first father and inquired as to why he was making an animal sacrifice. His answer was beautiful: “I know not, save the Lord commanded me” (Moses 5:5–6). Was Adam obeying blindly? Not at all. Adam and Eve had already had a great deal of experience with the Almighty. The early Brethren of this dispensation learned that “after man was created, he was not left without intelligence or understanding, to wander in darkness and spend an existence in ignorance and doubt (on the great and important point which effected his happiness) as to the real fact by whom he was created, or unto whom he was amenable for his conduct. God conversed with him face to face. In his presence he was permitted to stand, and from his own mouth he was permitted to receive instruction. He heard his voice, walked before him and gazed upon his glory, while intelligence burst upon his understanding, and enabled him to give names to the vast assemblage of his Maker’s works.”6 No blind obedience there.

• Faith is not the absence of certitude. I once heard one of my university students comment to a friend, “I don’t enjoy listening to Elder ________ at general conference. He lacks humility.”

His friend replied, “How do you know he is not humble?”

The response? “Listen to him carefully when he speaks. He is bold. He is confident. He is filled with certitude.”

A strange assessment at best. Humility is the virtue of having a correct and accurate view of yourself, of knowing your strengths and your weaknesses. More important, it is knowing the source of your strength, the source of your power. President Gordon B. Hinckley declared: “Some time ago a journalist from a prominent national publication spoke in Salt Lake City. I did not hear him, but I read the newspaper reports of his remarks. He is quoted as having said, ‘Certitude is the enemy of religion.’ The words attributed to him have stirred within me much reflection. Certitude, which I define as complete and total assurance, is not the enemy of religion. It is of its very essence.

“Certitude is certainty. It is conviction. It is the power of faith that approaches knowledge—yes, that even becomes knowledge. It evokes enthusiasm, and there is no asset comparable to enthusiasm in overcoming opposition, prejudice, and indifference. Great buildings were never constructed on uncertain foundations. Great causes were never brought to success by vacillating leaders. The gospel was never expounded to the convincing of others without certainty. Faith, which is of the very essence of personal conviction, has always been and always must be at the root of religious practice and endeavor. . . .

“If the Latter-day Saints, as individuals, ever lose that certitude, the Church will dwindle as so many other churches have. But I have no fear of that. I am confident that an ever-­enlarging membership will seek for and find that personal conviction which we call testimony, which comes by the power of the Holy Ghost, and which can weather the storms of adversity.”7 Indeed, faith leads to and results in certitude.

• Faith is not positive thinking, nor does it consist in willing something into existence. Obviously it is a good thing to be positive, to be upward looking, to be optimistic about now and the future. One has to spend only a short time with a naysaying pessimist to appreciate being with someone whose words are affirming, enriching, and edifying. And if any people in all the wide world have reason to be positive, to rejoice frequently, it is the Latter-day Saints. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the good news, the glad tidings that Jesus of Nazareth was in very deed the Christ, the Promised Messiah. It is celebratory news that through his atoning suffering in Gethsemane and on Golgotha, his death on the cross, and his glorious rise from Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb to resurrected immortality, we may have our sins remitted, our souls sanctified, our bodies and spirits reunited, never again to be divided, so as to receive a fulness of joy in the resurrection (D&C 93:33). Further, how could we possibly be negative and pessimistic for very long, knowing that that same gospel has been restored in our day in its fulness through the call of a latter-day prophet? Because of the knowledge, power, covenants, and ordinances that have been delivered to earth through God’s legal administrators, we are enabled to “enjoy the words of eternal life in this world, and eternal life in the world to come” (Moses 6:59), including the continuation of the family unit into eternity.

But faith is not positive thinking. Nor can one with a positive attitude will things into being. Imagine a full-time missionary, a zone leader, serving, let’s say, in France, who turns to the missionaries under his charge and says, “Come on, elders and sisters, if we just had the faith we could baptize this whole country!” The Gospel of Mark records that while in his hometown, Nazareth, the people heard the Savior’s preaching and asked, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended at him. But Jesus said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.” Now note this astounding verse: “And he could there do no mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them” (Mark 6:3–5; emphasis added). Now imagine that we heard someone standing fifty feet away from Jesus say, “Come on, Lord, just exercise your faith!” No, that would never be appropriate, not just because he is the Son of the living God, the second member of the Godhead. Jesus could not and did not reward faithlessness with a display of signs and wonders, because “faith cometh not by signs, but signs follow those that believe” (D&C 63:9).

The Book of Mormon records that approximately 350 years after the birth of Christ, Mormon sought earnestly to lead his wayward people back to faith. He had been appointed the leader of the Nephite armies and at about this time won a battle against the Lamanites. Mormon explained that “the Nephites began to repent of their iniquity, and began to cry even as had been prophesied by Samuel the prophet; for behold no man could keep that which was his own [see Helaman 13:37]. . . . Thus there began to be a mourning and a lamentation in all the land because of these things, and more especially among the people of Nephi.” Mormon was thrilled, hoping against hope that something, anything, could bring about a conversion among his people. “But behold this my joy was vain, for their sorrowing was not unto repentance, because of the goodness of God; but it was rather the sorrowing of the damned, because the Lord would not always suffer them to take happiness in sin. And they did not come unto Jesus with broken hearts and contrite spirits, but they did curse God, and wish to die” (Mormon 2:10–14). Now picture some positive-minded, goal-driven, twenty-first-century person on the sidelines sounding off: “Mormon, Mormon. Come on, you’ve got to put your heart in it. Let’s exercise some faith!”

In all three of these scenarios are factors over which the missionary, the Master himself, and the prophet-editor Mormon had no control. One of these factors—and a deeply significant one at that—is the moral agency of the people, their right to choose what they will do with their lives. Being positive and upbeat is great, indeed so much better than being deflated or living like Eeyore the donkey. But it is not faith.

• Faith is not absolute certainty as a result of tangible, observable evidence. Alma remarked in his marvelous discourse on faith: “Yea, there are many who do say: If thou wilt show unto us a sign from heaven, then we shall know of a surety; then we shall believe. Now I ask, is this faith? Behold, I say unto you, Nay; for if a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe, for he knoweth it” (Alma 32:17–18). These verses are crucial to our understanding what it means to have faith in these latter days, a taxing time of spreading unbelief. Far too many people today—and some of these people are Latter-day Saints—want tangible, empirical, scientifically verifiable evidence for the truthfulness of the restored gospel. If we could demonstrate through DNA research that the Nephites and Lamanites were actual, pre-Columbian people and that the Lehite colony did in fact come from Jerusalem, then this critic will believe. If in the near future adequate and substantial archaeological evidences for the Book of Mormon peoples could be found, then the naysayer would be persuaded of the historicity of this Testament of Jesus Christ. If we could just prove convincingly that the eleven Egyptian papyri fragments held by the Church have something to do with Abraham the prophet, then that doubter will accept the book of Abraham as ancient holy scripture.

In using Thomas the apostle as an illustration, President Howard W. Hunter explained that “in a sense, Thomas represents the spirit of our age. He would not be satisfied with anything he could not see [John 20:19–29], even though he had been with the Master and knew his teachings concerning faith and doubt. . . . Faith does not take precedence over doubt when one must feel or see in order to believe.

“Thomas . . . wanted knowledge, not faith. Knowledge is related to the past because our experiences of the past are those things which give us knowledge, but faith is related to the future—to the unknown where we have not yet walked.” President Hunter wisely observed: “Thomas had said, ‘To see is to believe,’ but Christ answered, ‘To believe is to see.’”8

If we were to take Thomas’s approach, we might well demand physical proof or a rational explanation for what Jesus did when he healed the lepers, the paralyzed, the woman with the issue of blood, blind Bartimaeus; when he multiplied the loaves and fishes and fed five thousand men; when he calmed the raging storm on the Sea of Galilee; when he raised from the dead the daughter of the Roman centurion, the son of the widow of Nain, and Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha. Can we provide scientific evidence for such miracles? No, we cannot. Then how do we know that they actually took place?

“All the scriptures, including the Book of Mormon, will remain in the realm of faith,” Elder Maxwell taught. “Science will not be able to prove or disprove holy writ. However, enough plausible evidence will come forth to prevent scoffers from having a field day, but not enough to remove the requirement of faith. Believers must be patient during such unfolding.”9 In speaking of historical analysis, Latter-day Saint scholar Patrick Mason wrote, “There is nothing more unstable than basing one’s life and outlook purely on the latest scholarship, let alone one’s casual perusal of it. What appears to be solid is actually quite transient.” In other words, “scholarship makes for a fairly wobbly foundation upon which to build one’s profoundest commitments. I can’t imagine a more maddening life than to rise each morning to consult the learned journals to see what one’s position de jour is.”10

Professor Hugh W. Nibley was a beloved twentieth-century Latter-day Saint apologist, a defender of the faith. I had the distinct pleasure, for a time, to serve as chair of his department at Brigham Young University, and I came to know something not only about his mind (which was amazing) but also a great deal about his soul. As many Saints know, he was a man of extraordinary intellect, but, perhaps more important, he was a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ and a man of deep and abiding faith in the restored gospel. “The words of the prophets,” he testified well over a half century ago, “cannot be held to the tentative and defective tests that men have devised for them. Science, philosophy, and common sense all have a right to their day in court. But the last word does not lie with them. Every time men in their wisdom have come forth with the last word, other words have promptly followed. The last word is a testimony of the gospel that comes only by direct revelation. Our Father in heaven speaks it, and if it were in perfect agreement with the science of today, it would surely be out of line with the science of tomorrow. Let us not, therefore, seek to hold God to the learned opinions of the moment when he speaks the language of eternity.”11

• Faith is not built on a weak foundation or on flimsy evidence. I was asked some years ago by a mission president to speak to his missionaries at a zone conference. We had a healthy discussion and exchange of ideas. I was invited to stay for lunch and visit with the missionaries. I did a great deal of listening and learned much. One interesting conversation revolved around a young couple who were being taught by the missionaries but were not progressing. “They’re golden people,” one elder said, “ripe and ready for membership in the Church. They just won’t commit to being baptized.”

Several suggestions were made by the missionaries listening in—fasting with them, having the bishop meet with them, intensifying the friendshipping effort, etc., to all of which the first elder said, “We’ve tried that.”

After a long pause, another elder inquired, “Have you given them the ‘scrolls discussion’?”

The first elder responded, “No. Do you think this would be a good time for the ‘scrolls discussion’?”

“Sounds like a perfect time to me,” the first came back.

Now I had never heard of the “scrolls discussion.” I was dying to know what it was, so I blurted out, “What’s the ‘scrolls discussion’?”

The second elder stared at me rather quizzically and said, “Surely, Brother Millet, you’ve heard of the ‘scrolls discussion’?”

I indicated that I had not.

“The ‘scrolls discussion,’” he said, “involves showing the people how the Dead Sea Scrolls prove the truthfulness of the Church!”

I replied, “Fascinating. How do they do that?”

“Well,” he said, “as you know, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain information about a group of very early Christians out in the deserts of Judea.”

I responded, “No, they don’t. The Dead Sea Scrolls were written by a group of hyper-religious Jews.”

He said, “Oh. I didn’t know that.” Then he said, “Well, you do know that they had three presiding high priests at the head of their church.”

I indicated that the leaders of the group were Aaronic priests, not Melchizedek.

The elder went on. “Well, there’s some fascinating doctrine within the scrolls that proves our doctrine to be true.”

I commented that the scrolls were interesting historical documents, but they did very little for us doctrinally.

This exchange went on for about five minutes, the elder providing what he thought to be airtight “proofs” and I trying gently to let him know that most of what he understood about the Dead Sea Scrolls was simply untrue. I could see the frustration in his eyes. Finally he sighed and concluded, “Well, I’ll just say this—the ‘scrolls discussion’ has always worked for me!”

I thought then (and since) about all the people who might have come into the Church as a result of what they learned in the famous “scrolls discussion.” I shuddered.

Conclusion

Faith is NOT many things. We must be grounded and settled spiritually to exercise faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, faith in the power of redemption that comes only through the sufferings and death of Christ, faith in the Father’s perfect plan of salvation, faith in the restored Church of Jesus Christ and its apostolic leadership. This is vital, for it is only a solid faith, an enduring and fruitful faith, that will empower us to “withstand the evil day” and to “quench all the fiery darts of the wicked” (D&C 27:15, 17). It is only through acting on a faith built on truth—“things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come” (D&C 93:24)—that deep conversion takes place. Then we are able to face opposition calmly, encounter enemies kindly but boldly, and make our way through the mists of darkness to the tree of life.

Robert J. Matthews, former dean of religious education at Brigham Young University, counseled me on several occasions to be careful not to be found laboring in secondary causes. Elder Dallin H. Oaks declared that “the number of good things we can do far exceeds the time available to accomplish them. Some things are better than good, and these are the things that should command priority attention in our lives. . . .

“Some uses of individual and family time are better, and others are best. We have to forego some good things in order to choose others that are better or best because they develop faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and strengthen our families.”12

The world has its counterfeits for faith. Consequently, one of the great needs of this dispensation is for the Saints of the Most High, those who have been called out of darkness into the Master’s marvelous light (1 Peter 2:9), to obtain and exercise the gift of discernment—to discern truth from error, good from evil, that which is permanent from that which is transitory, that which is of greatest worth from that which is really of little consequence.

Notes

1. Tanner, “Basis for Faith in the Living God,” Ensign, Nov. 1978, 46.

2. Lectures on Faith, 3.

3. Lectures on Faith, 38.

4. McConkie, New Witness for the Articles of Faith, 166.

5. Young, as paraphrased in Lee, Stand Ye in Holy Places, 163; see also Brigham Young, in Journal of Discourses, 9:150.

6. Lectures on Faith, 13.

7. Hinckley, Faith, 1, 5–6.

8. Howard W. Hunter, 272–73. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland offered inspired counsel to Brigham Young University students when he pointed them toward a life of faith, encouraging them to look forward to the future and not allow themselves to become prisoners of their past, in To My Friends, 143–53.

9. Maxwell, Plain and Precious Things, 4.

10. Mason, Planted, 72.

11. Nibley, World and the Prophets, 134; emphasis added.

12. Oaks, “Good, Better, Best,” Ensign, Nov. 2007, 104, 107.