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APPENDIX B Attempting to keep up with changing and contradictory Mormon doctrine is a challenge. Mormonism demonstrates that a faith built on something less than an immutable God will necessarily exhibit changing doctrine to match changing practice. Nothing in Mormonism is changeless. Major doctrines rise and fall as needed. A few interesting contradictions follow. Polygamy. Mormonism taught polygamy until Utah was threatened with losing admittance to the Union. Then they got a "revelation" banning plural marriage. It is interesting that all the years they were polygamous, the Book of Mormon taught (in Jacob 2:24) that polygamy was abominable to God. Emma Smith, Josephs wife, was told by "revelation" that if she did not submit to the polygamy teaching she would be "destroyed" (Doctrine and Covenants, Section 132). Apostle Orson Hyde claimed that Jesus married both Mary and Martha (Journal of Discourses, Vol. 4, pp. 259-260; Journal of Discourses, Vol. 2, p. 210). Eternal Progression. Joseph Smith taught that God "is an exalted Man" (Journal of Discourses, Vol. 6, p. 3), and President Wilford Woodruff agreed: "God himself is progressing in knowledge, power, and dominion, and will do so worlds without end" (Journal of Discourses, Vol. 6, p. 120). Mormon President Joseph Fielding Smith disagreed. "It seems strange to me," he wrote, "that members of the church will hold to the doctrine, God increases in knowledge. & I think this kind of doctrine is very dangerous" (Doctrine of Salvation, Vol. 1, pp. 7-8). Creation. Brigham Young said, "Adam was made from the dust of an earth, but not the dust of this earth." Joseph Fielding Smith disagreed: "The Book of Mormon, the Bible, the Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price all declare that Adams body was created from the dust of the ground that is, from the dust of this ground, this earth." Adam-God. Brigham Young taught that Adam was the only god with whom we had to do. He defended that position by citing "how much unbelief exists in the minds of Latter-day Saints in regard to one particular doctrine which I revealed to them, and which God revealed to me namely, that Adam is our father and God&" (Deseret News, June 18, 1873). But the October 9, 1976, issue of the Mormon-owned Deseret News reported President Spencer W. Kimball as saying, "We denounce that [Adam-God] theory and hope that everyone will be cautioned against this and other kinds of false doctrine." Mormon author W. Cleon Skousen in The First Two Thousand Years (pp. 355-56) wrote that God is God because He has the support of other intelligent beings in the universe, and that if those beings should ever withdraw their support from Him, "he would cease to be God." |