Terryl Givens: Discipleship, Persons, and Institutions

from A Thoughtful Faith for the 21st Century

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Of all the moral virtues, courage holds pride of place in my own pantheon of revered qualities. Having read the historical accounts of Christianity’s first martyrs, I am most moved by the words of the aged Polycarp. Led to execution by immolation, he had merely to renounce his faith in Christ to escape the flames. Eyewitnesses recorded his response: “Eighty-six years have I served him, and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King and my Savior?” And so he perished, as did hundreds of others of his era who did not merely profess belief, but enacted their faith at horrific cost. The key to understanding such courage may be reflected in the words of the scholar of early Christianity Marcellino D’Ambrosio: these martyrs, he wrote, “died for a person, not an ideology.”

The young Polycarp had known the aged John the Apostle, but he was born almost four decades after the death of Jesus. It is the more remarkable, therefore—assuming as I do that D’Ambrosio is correct—that one’s connection to Christ, one’s feeling of love and loyalty, could attain to such a pitch of personal intensity, catalyzing such absolute courage and sacrifice. The same may be true of many martyrs through history, and of many among our own community of Saints. I would hope the same is true of myself, but I have not been called upon for such acts of raw bravery and cannot know.

However, in our religious lives as Latter-day Saints, the presence of that institution through which we learn of Christ, and through which we worship Christ, continually threatens to loom larger than Christ himself in our hierarchy of loyalties. Far larger, in any case, than was true in the small, tightly knit associations of Christians of Polycarp’s era, who met in house churches and were presided over only by local pastors within their own orbit. Our relationship to Christ, in other words, is much more profoundly mediated, conditioned, shaped, formed, and contextualized than was the case for Christians of the first few generations. And we need—or at least I need—to constantly consider that institutional presence, and what it means for my discipleship.

I take it as a given that the church is “true and living.” More importantly, it is, ideally, steeped in truth and “life-giving,” in the words of the second-century church father Irenaeus. Yet, it is beyond dispute that its leaders are not infallible, and its members can individually and collectively, in the words of a Book of Mormon prophet, be “a great stumbling block” (Alma 4:10). Still, this particular incarnation of the body of Christ was formed under divine guidance. Through its inspired prophet, the “great story” of humankind’s eternal saga was restored; as were the true (plural and passible) nature of God, the origin and destiny of the human soul, and the durability of what we most cherish: human love, relationships, “sociability.”

In what precise sense, then, is the church living or life-giving, and how to proceed when those epithets no longer ring true in our personal life? My devotion, like Polycarp’s, is to the Christ, “the light which is in all things, which giveth life to all things” (D&C 88:13). My personal faith is in the felt actuality, the literal truth behind those words. And my fidelity to the church resides in my trust that the institution has most fully revealed him, provided me the practical resources to learn to emulate him, and stewards the holy powers that empower me to be eternally “at one” with him—and with those I love. If those three propositions are true, then the negative dimensions of the institution, as of any institution filled by human servants, are in the end beside the point. That does not entirely ameliorate the frustrations, the pain, and the personal costs those temporal realities bring in their turbulent wake.

Orson Pratt was, to my mind, the most heroic instance of a disciple who could experience the crushing disappointment of watching good men building a stumbling block, and still remain unmoved in his commitment to Christ and to truth. In the more contemporary era, and much more abundantly documented, we have the case of Eugene England as a Saint who wrestled with the conflicts he felt between personal conviction and institutional loyalty. I offer his story not for its moral exemplariness or for the solutions it offers, but for what it might teach us about the perseverance in our church culture of the original dilemma of Eden: how do we face with fortitude and resolution those conflicts we inevitably encounter between competing Goods? And as we Saints continue to work through our own “late to the party” version of a modernist crisis, his prescience about the insistent demands of a historical consciousness in treating our own historical past and institutional formation are especially timely.