I was once invited to attend LDS seminary classes at the public high school my youngest daughter attended. Seminary, for those who don’t know, is a four-year program put together by the LDS Church for their high school students. The one-year topics are Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine and Covenants (church history).
LDS students throughout the United States typically meet before or after school at the local LDS chapel. In Utah, however, most high schools have a dedicated building located next door for the students to attend during the school day in a program called “release time.” The majority of this school’s student body—of the school’s 1,800 students, 1,000 attend seminary—are enrolled at this seminary, which is located directly behind the school.
The instructors are given freedom to teach the assigned material, the same across the board for all seminary classes this year. Doing their best to engage the students, the attitude of these five men (professional teachers who are paid a wage by the LDS Church that is equal to their public school counterparts) reminded me why I remained in Christian education for so long.
The lesson for this particular day covered D&C 1, emphasizing the importance of the LDS leadership. In fact, the journal assigned by one teacher asked, “Look around this room and see the different pictures. Who would you choose to eat dinner with and why?”
On one wall were the individual photos of the three men comprising the First Presidency as well as the twelve apostles. In addition, pictures of each of the sixteen prophets, beginning with Joseph Smith, were displayed in the back of the room.
When the students were done with the assignment, they were allowed to share their choices with the class. One boy picked Brigham Young, a man he said was vital for the early growth of the church. Another girl chose Gordon B. Hinckley, an obvious pick for someone who was a child at the time when Hinckley was wrapping up his life.
Nobody picked Jesus, even though there were two pictures of Him in the room. This would have been my choice, I suppose, if I had been given the assignment.
An illustration epitomized for me the difference between Mormonism and Christianity. The teacher drew two stick-people figures on the white board and added a tall wall between them. He explained how human beings were represented by the figure on the right. On the left, he said, stood God the Father. The wall was symbolic of the inability for communication to take place between God and man. My brain’s juices were flowing.
Certainly this wall must represent sin! (Rom 3:23; 6:23) Then he drew a third person standing on top of the wall, with arrows pointing up and down to the two lower figures. He said that this figure represented the one communicating God’s mind to humanity. In my mind, I thought, “What a great illustration! Yes, this is Jesus.” After all, 1 Timothy 2:5 says, “For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus.” God’s message of this incredible atonement is revealed to us today through the Word of God, the Bible.
Unfortunately, this was not the pick of the seminary teacher. Instead, he explained how this figure represented the modern-day prophet embodied today in Thomas S. Monson, who was the president at that time of this teaching in 2015.
What was the take-home message? According to Mormonism, God has given humanity a person to bridge the gap for humans to understand the truth. This man, called the president or prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is responsible to see what God intends for people to know and then communicate it with humanity, even providing the latest information that is not revealed in the Bible.
Christians believe they have the ability to understand God’s mindset for how they are to think, believe, and act through the teachings of the Bible. As Jesus said, “Sanctify them by the truth. Thy word is truth” (John 17:17). Thus, we do not hold that a person stands at the top of the triangle and, like a baseball third base coach, gives the signs as dictated by the manager in the dugout. Instead, Christians have the Word of God and have the ability to look straight into the dugout to see the manager’s signs of bunt, steal, or take a pitch.
This is possible because we have God’s Word, the 66 books of the Bible, to communicate to us even in the 21st century; Christians have no need for a frail sinful man to provide “modern revelation” that can contradict straightforward biblical teaching.
The Christian’s authority is straight from the Bible and there is no need to rely on another other human other than Jesus who has provided His written word through several dozen men writing 66 books over a 1500-year period on three different continents, each one giving one basic message explaining God’s love for humanity.
The illustration given by the seminary teacher is a perfect example to show the difference between Mormonism and Christianity’s view of authority. Indeed, they are not the same modus operandi.