Covenantal Non-Dogmatism

“I never thought it was right to call up a man and try him because he erred in doctrine. … [Others] have creeds which a man must believe or be kicked out of their church. I want the liberty of believing as I please.”¹

— Joseph Smith, April 8, 1843

In 1835, the Saints in Kirtland published a volume whose title meant exactly what it said. The Doctrine and Covenants had two parts: the “Doctrine” was the Lectures on Faith, seven theological lectures prepared for the School of the Elders; the “Covenants” were the revelations. A general assembly of the Church accepted the whole volume — Lectures included — by vote.² For eighty-six years the book carried its theology under that arrangement. Then, in 1921, the Lectures were quietly removed. There was no revelation announcing the change, no vote of repudiation, no crisis. The stated rationale was that the Lectures “were never presented to nor accepted by the Church as being otherwise than theological lectures or lessons” — a statement in some tension with the minutes of 1835. The title stayed. The book called Doctrine and Covenants has now spent more than a century containing covenants but not the “Doctrine” that named it, and most Latter-day Saints have never noticed the absence, because nothing they depend on was resting on it.

The episode is small, procedural, and almost comically undramatic, which is exactly why it is worth beginning with. This should cause us to pause and ask questions: A church removed the portion of its canon explicitly labeled Doctrine, the closest thing it had to a creed, and its unity did not so much as flicker. The lesson is not that the Church has no doctrine (it clearly teaches, corrects, and binds). The lesson is about where the binding force lives: whatever holds this people together, it was never the part of the book that carried the label. And the official explanation is as instructive as the removal itself. Rather than saying we taught this and now teach otherwise, the institution said, in effect, it was never really Doctrine to begin with — reclassifying the past to preserve the category rather than revising the category to fit the past. Both instincts — binding by something other than theology, and tidying the record retroactively — will recur throughout this essay. So will a third, quieter observation: the word doctrine went right on working in LDS thought after losing its referent, because words outlive their groundings. What that word points to has been moving for two hundred years, and much of our confusion about doctrine is downstream of pretending it has not.

The LDS debate about doctrine, in other words, usually begins too late. We ask which teachings count as ‘doctrine’ only after assuming that the Church should possess something like a stable doctrinal inventory: a settled list of propositions, clearly ranked, permanently defined, and ready to answer every hard question. But that expectation is borrowed from traditions with creeds, catechisms, and formal theories of doctrinal closure. The Restoration, of course, claims something different: an open canon, living prophets, revisable practices, and continuing revelation. A church of that kind may still speak authoritatively, but it will not distribute authority evenly across all its teachings.³

Covenantal Non-Dogmatism is my name for this structure.⁴ It is a claim about the instrument of binding. The Church holds its people together not primarily by propositions but by covenant: ordinances entered, interviews examined, priesthood order sustained, a common table kept — with assent asked only to the thin core of belief required to make that covenantal life possible. The gradations the models chart are real, but they are downstream of this instrument: teachings carry different kinds of force because they stand at different, observable, shifting distances from enacted covenant, not because they occupy different rows of a timeless inventory that no one has ever managed to produce. This does not mean the Church has no doctrine, that teachings are optional, or that truth is a matter of taste. The binding is real. Its medium is simply covenant rather than creed — and the difference in medium, this essay will argue, changes everything: what doctrine is, how it moves, why the hard cases behave as they do, and why the resulting spaciousness is a glory rather than a defect.

If this is right, then CND is not a defensive strategy for lowering expectations after hard historical discoveries. It is a positive theological account of one of the Restoration’s most arresting features. Mormonism is most itself not when it imitates a closed doctrinal system, but when it owns the structure just described — covenantal seriousness at the floor, and above it large stretches of theology left alive, unfinished, and open to further light.

The Problem Behind the Problem

A word with a moving referent

The word doctrine has not meant one thing in LDS history. It was baptized into Mormon usage inside a thoroughly Protestant linguistic world. In the religious English of the 1820s and 1830s, doctrine meant, simply, teaching — “whatever is taught,” in Webster’s 1828 rendering, “the principles or positions of any sect or master.”⁵ Joseph Smith and his contemporaries used it exactly that way, as a rough synonym for teaching, and the 1835 volume could label the Lectures on Faith its “Doctrine” precisely because doctrine just meant the substance of what the Church taught. During the correlation era the word narrowed to mean all official instruction. More recently it has often narrowed further, to mean eternal, salvific truth taught with united prophetic authority. Michael Goodman’s study of how General Conference discourse itself deploys the word is the best empirical record of this drift: the term’s usage within the Church’s most authoritative public venue has demonstrably shifted across the tradition’s lifetime.⁶

Philosophy of language offers a useful frame for what happened. On the causal-historical picture of reference, speakers use a term successfully not because each of them carries a correct definition in their head, but because they stand in a chain of usage reaching back to the term’s original grounding — each generation inheriting the word from the last and presuming, usually without thought, that it still points where it always did. But chains can shift their grounding without anyone deciding anything; Gareth Evans’s famous example is “Madagascar,” which originally named part of the African mainland and drifted, through accumulated misuse, to name the island.⁷ Doctrine in Latter-day Saint usage has undergone exactly such a shift: the community has re-grounded the term — from teaching generally, to official teaching, to eternal truth — while the chain of usage carried on unbroken, so that the change registers to most speakers not as change at all but as what the word obviously always meant.

The payoff of this frame is not philosophical decoration. First, it explains why the doctrine debate feels interminable: participants standing at different points in the referential chain ask “is X doctrine?” and mean measurably different questions by it, so the dispute is partly verbal — a symptom of drift, not a disagreement any taxonomy could settle. Second, and more important for everything that follows, it names a specific and almost invisible error: semantic anachronism, reading the current grounding back into older texts. When a modern reader meets the word doctrine in an 1843 sermon or on an 1835 title page and hears “eternal, unchanging, salvific truth,” the reader is not interpreting the past but overwriting it. Much of what this essay will criticize as retrospective cleanup begins life as this innocent-looking semantic reflex.

The narrowing itself is understandable, and this essay is not an argument against it. A global church cannot allow every sermon, speculation, or private synthesis to masquerade as binding truth. Correlation was, in part, an attempt to navigate explosive global growth in a religion that rejoices in sometimes confusing theological enthusiasm with revelation. But prudent narrowing is not systematic closure, and it is no mandate to stop studying beyond what is agreed upon. Mormonism still has no officially adopted systematic theology, no binding catechism, and no universally accepted theory of doctrine. Its members and even leaders have generated approximations of all three and canonized none of them as final — that absence is usually treated as a deficiency when compared to our neighboring religions, but it is more of a clue.

The systematizers

The pattern is old. The Lectures on Faith tried to give the Saints a theological “Doctrine” alongside commandments; they were influential for decades and then removed from the canon. Orson Pratt tried to systematize Mormon teaching into a coherent theological whole; he was checked and corrected by the First Presidency. Talmage and Widtsoe offered instructive syntheses for a growing church; they remain enduringly useful but were never binding as final frameworks. McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine came closer than anything else to functioning as an LDS catechism: it was widely used, heavily criticized, but never adopted as official doctrine. Gospel Principles served as a doctrinal study guide for new members but was discontinued in 2019 in favor of Come, Follow Me — notably a more pastoral and meditative guide. Every generation has produced its would-be systematizer, and the institution has honored, used, corrected, and declined to canonize every one of them.

The model-builders, family by family

In the modern period the attempts become more self-aware, offering frameworks for the messy question of defining doctrine rather than full-blown systematic theologies. This literature — surveyed most usefully by Goodman — deserves more than a catalogue of names with a verdict apiece.⁸ It is better assessed family by family, asking three questions of each: what does this family of models see truly? where does it break? and what must any successor account inherit from it? Read this way, the literature is not a pile of failed attempts. It is a genealogy (we will note that successive models growing sharper about where the difficulty actually lies) and CND is offered as an heir. I cannot mention every author and thinker by name, but will list many in the recommended reading.

Because their outputs look alike (everyone’s chart ends in ranked layers with reassuring names) the families are best distinguished not by the categories they produce but by the question each one answers: What fixes a teaching’s doctrinal status? There are two live choices hiding in that question: whether status lives in the teaching or in the church’s relation to the teaching, and whether it is fixed at a moment or across time. I will demonstrate what I mean by this. The four substantive families each stake out one combination. Content models locate status in the teaching, timelessly: what a teaching is about settles what it is. Source models locate it in the teaching’s founding moment: how it arrived settles what it is. Tiered models locate it in the church’s present: how the institution now holds a teaching settles what it is. Process models locate it in the church’s history: how the institution came to hold it settles what it is. Keeping the four answers apart matters, because each family fails precisely at its own blind spot — and the arrangement predicts, before a single case is examined, which family will come nearest the truth.

Source models hold that doctrine is what comes through authorized channels: the standard works first, then united statements of the First Presidency and the Twelve, then official proclamation and curriculum. Robert Millet’s influential test — is it in the canon, taught by current united authority, and found in current curriculum? — is the most developed version, and Elder Christofferson’s account of how doctrine is established through revelation to those holding apostolic keys is its ecclesial statement.⁹ These models take seriously the Church’s own self-understanding that teaching authority is located, not diffuse, and any account that treats a conference address and a blog post as epistemic equals has misdescribed the religion. But the family breaks on cases where the channel itself reverses. The Lectures on Faith entered through the most authorized channel imaginable — canonization by general assembly — and exited by editorial decision. Adam-God came through the presiding officer of the Church and was for a time enacted in the temple, yet did not consolidate. To survive these cases, source models must quietly add a temporal index — doctrine is what comes through authorized channels now — at which point the model has conceded that sources alone never settled anything; persistence and present affirmation were doing the real work. What any successor must inherit: present living authority as a genuine, non-negotiable variable in doctrinal standing.

Content models distinguish eternal doctrine from a whole host of other teachings like temporal policy, application, or practice: the substance of eternal doctrine is unchanging, the rest of the packaging adapts. This is probably the most intuitive family: it matches the felt difference between “families are eternal” and two-hour church, and the Church’s own public statements regularly reach for it. David Paulsen’s acknowledgment that mortal formulations of divine truth are historically conditioned gives the family its most careful philosophical form.¹⁰ To steelman this group: the distinction answers to something real, and no believer actually thinks meeting schedules and the nature of God bind in the same way. But notice how strong the claim is: on a content model, a teaching’s status supervenes on its essence, so status can never really change — only our recognition of it can. Ask of any family the test question can a teaching change status without changing content? and the content model is the family that must answer no. That answer has a price, and the flagship hard case collects it. The priesthood and temple restriction was defended for generations, by those authorized to teach, in explicitly doctrinal terms; after 1978 it was reclassified as practice, and its former justifications disavowed. A content model cannot describe this as change. It is forced to say the restriction was always mere policy and had simply been misclassified for a century — which makes retrospective cleanup not an occasional temptation but a structural requirement of the model: the semantic anachronism of the last section, now performed at the level of classification rather than vocabulary. And even granting the move, the sorting turns out to be reliably available only in retrospect; a criterion that delivers its verdicts only after the institution has moved is not a criterion but a chronicle. The deepest trouble is that the sorting is covert alethiology: it classifies teachings by what is eternally true rather than by what presently binds — a distinction that will carry heavy weight later in this essay — and sorting by eternal truth is precisely the operation that the revelatory epistemology sketched in the next section says mortal knowers, prophets included, cannot reliably perform in advance. What any successor must inherit: the two-layer instinct itself. There is a difference in kind of force between teachings; the mistake is believing the layers can be sorted by inspecting content, rather than by observing what the Church covenantally enacts.

Tiered models propose that teachings come in ranked strata. Armand Mauss offered one of the original four-tier “scale of authenticity” ideas — canonical, official, authoritative, popular — explicitly as an operational construct rather than a theology.¹¹ Sweat, MacKay, and Dirkmaat’s widely taught concentric-rings model is the family’s pedagogical flowering.¹² This is, I think, the best careful family in the literature, because its core insight — that Latter-day Saint teaching is not flat — is simply correct, and pastorally urgent: most doctrinal whiplash in the pews comes from members holding peripheral teachings with core-level grip. It is also the family most easily confused with content models, since its output (ranked strata with names like “core” and “policy”) looks like theirs; the difference shows in the test question. Where the content model must deny that status can change without content changing, the tiered model can affirm it: status here is a fact about the institution, not about the teaching, so teachings have careers. That is the family’s great advantage, and it spares Mauss the content model’s forced move — a tiered model can say plainly that the restriction occupied the official tier and then fell out of it, no retroactive reclassification required. But the advantage creates a debt: a model in which teachings have careers owes an account of what moves them, and this no member of the family supplies thoroughly. The tiers are snapshots, and the Church is a film. A static chart cannot represent traffic: the Word of Wisdom migrating inward from counsel to covenantal boundary over decades, Adam-God migrating outward from temple lecture to repudiated speculation. Nor does the family supply a principled criterion for placement — assignment to a ring is intuition calibrated to the present moment, which means the chart silently redraws itself each generation while presenting itself as timeless. (The reference drift again, now baked into diagrams.) What any successor must inherit: gradation. CND keeps the tiers’ non-flatness but re-grounds it in something observable — what the Church enacts in ordinance, examines in interviews, and promulgates to the world — rather than in judgments about content.

Process models locate doctrine not in a list or a chart but in a procedure: doctrine is what emerges from a defined institutional process. Christofferson’s description of counsel, deliberation, and revelation among those holding keys belongs partly here; so does David Holland’s “triangle,” in which revelations proposed by prophets become canon only through the sustaining vote of the membership, so that scripture, prophets, and personal inspiration each limit the others;¹³ so, at a humbler register, does the 2007 Newsroom statement, with its public-facing heuristics for distinguishing core from periphery.¹⁴ Nathan Oman’s jurisprudential proposal — reading doctrine the way a common-law tradition reads precedent, seeking the interpretation that puts the whole practice in its best light — is the family’s most sophisticated member, importing a live legal literature on how normative traditions bind across time.¹⁵ The steelman: process models correctly relocate doctrine from a timeless inventory into the ongoing life of a living institution — which is the move this essay also makes. But they break on the historical record’s stubborn refusal to supply the process. Ben Spackman has named the assumption at fault sola revelatione: the expectation that doctrinal transitions come by discrete revelatory event.¹⁶ The Word of Wisdom consolidated into a boundary with no such event — gradually, unevenly, across decades. Adam-God deconsolidated the same way; Brian Birch’s phrase magisterium via neglectum, retirement by omission, names the mechanism.¹⁷ A process model wants a procedure; the history mostly supplies a drift. What any successor must inherit: doctrine-making as institutional life — but with gradual, partly informal dynamics, not crisp parliamentary procedure.

Pastoral and dispositional contributions round out the literature, and it would be a category error to grade them as failed criteria, because they are not criteria at all. Jeffrey R. Holland’s preaching on the dignity of belief amid incompleteness, Bednar’s doctrine-principles-applications language for teaching, Bruce C. Hafen’s classic treatment of ambiguity as a stage of mature discipleship — these teach the Saint how to stand in the space the other families tried to map.¹⁸ The 2007 Newsroom statement partly belongs here too: not a philosophical theory but a pastoral reminder, aimed explicitly at reporters, not to confuse isolated quotations with binding teaching, and to remember that Latter-day Saint faith is known as much by fruits and lived discipleship as by propositions. What any successor must inherit: the recognition that the capacity to live with unfinished questions is not a concession the theory makes to human weakness, but part of what the theory is about.

A confession is owed before the verdicts are totaled: these families are ideal types, and nearly every actual model in the literature (and certainly in the readers’ minds and actual attempts to personally formulate doctrine) is a hybrid. The concentric-rings model sorts by institutional weight but names its rings in the vocabulary of content; Millet’s test crosses provenance with present teaching; Christofferson’s account is part source, part process. This is not sloppiness to be corrected, and the diagnosis offered here does not depend on any author fitting cleanly in one box. If anything, the hybridity is the literature groping toward something contemporary epistemology has largely made its peace with: that epistemic evaluation is plural. Fallibilism is as close to consensus as the discipline comes, and it has brought with it a broad suspicion of single-criterion monism. Alston argued that “justification” names not one property but a cluster of distinct epistemic desiderata; Kuhn showed us that even scientific theory choice weighs multiple values — accuracy, scope, simplicity, fruitfulness — with no algorithm for combining them.¹⁹ On this widely shared picture, good epistemic practice is the judgment-guided weighing of several partial indicators, none sufficient alone. The model-builders’ instinct to mix dimensions is that picture asserting itself against the tidiness of their own charts — and it is why CND, when its turn comes, will offer not a criterion but a cluster of markers, weighed rather than computed.

Alongside the model-builders sits the documentary record they must all survive. Charles Harrell’s This Is My Doctrine is less a model than a ledger of how core teachings have actually developed and shifted across LDS history.²⁰ Terryl Givens’s Wrestling the Angel performs a comparable service in a more synthetic register, documenting how internally plural the tradition’s theology has been from the beginning; Thomas Alexander’s classic essay on the reconstruction of Mormon doctrine did the same for the transformative early twentieth century.²¹ Any second-order account that cannot absorb this record without flinching is not describing the religion that exists.

Each family captures something real. These are valuable contributions to Latter-day Saint intellectual history, and they often build on one another meaningfully as Saints strive for further light and knowledge. Successive models have grown sharper about where the difficulty actually lies, giving us a real accumulation of insight — though not a convergence any fallibilist should mistake for arrival. And the pattern in their failures is itself the finding. The two families that locate doctrinal status in the teaching break when history moves it anyway: source models when the channel reverses, content models when the sorting arrives late. The family that locates status in the church’s present breaks when the present turns out to have a past: the tiers cannot be shown moving. Only process models look where the phenomena actually live (in the church, across time) and they fail in the gentlest way, expecting a procedure where the record supplies a drift. That is why the account this essay goes on to build recognizably shares values with process accounts, corrected: church-relative, diachronic, tolerant of drift, and read off what the institution observably enacts rather than off a procedure it does not follow. In case after case the difficulty is not that clever people have failed to produce the right chart, but that the evidence can be sorted in more than one plausible way. These failures are the honest results of fallibilist attempts to get closer to truth. As the statisticians say: all models are wrong, but some are useful.

The deeper problem is not the lack of consensus. It is that we keep trying to solve an epistemological and ecclesiological problem with taxonomy alone, asking for a final inventory from a tradition organized around ongoing revelation, living authority, and unfinished understanding.

Start With Revelation, Not Taxonomy

I am not proposing another theory of doctrine, more of a precursor or prolegomena to one; and I will first identify the epistemological commitments any such theory must build on. Any LDS theory of doctrine that skips revelation theory will break. Before asking what counts as doctrine, we have to ask what kind of thing revelation is and what kind of confidence it can bear.

First, prophets remain human. The prophetic mantle does not erase temperament, limitation, vocabulary, bias, or historical location. God does not unmake the man when He calls the prophet. We know from experience how hard it is to detect the still, small whisper of the Holy Ghost in our own lives, and the claim that prophets generally receive revelation the same way is the canon’s own self-description. Doctrine and Covenants 9 frames revelation as study, judgment, and confirmation rather than dictation; D&C 8:2 locates it in the mind and heart; Elijah finds the Lord not in the wind, earthquake, or fire but in a still small voice (1 Kings 19:11–12); and modern prophets have repeatedly described their own revelatory experience in the same quiet terms. Expansive visions and angelic visitations are real, but they are comparatively rare even within the lives of the prophets who received them.

Second, revelation is accommodated. It comes through language, culture, expectation, inherited concepts, and mortal understanding. Prophets can only speak (and can only receive) through the lens of their presuppositions, worldview, and historical moment. To say that something is revealed is not to say that it arrives as pure, unmediated, context-free divine content.

Third, truth comes line upon line. Revelation in the Restoration is iterative. It clarifies, deepens, redirects, and sometimes overturns prior assumptions. Something may be inspired without being final, and at times we discover we have misunderstood or have been barking up the wrong tree entirely and must prune a branch back down in our overgrown doctrinal garden. A living church cannot pretend that every strong statement is the last word.

Our own canon already teaches this embrace of prophetic fallibility. The Book of Mormon’s title page acknowledges directly that it may contain “the mistakes of men.” Doctrine and Covenants 130 records Joseph Smith receiving revelation and still being left uncertain about its meaning, and later the prophet was surprised to learn he had misinterpreted an earlier revelation (D&C 137:5–10; compare D&C 76:50–113). The Books of Moses and Abraham offer differing inspired accounts of the same creation. D&C 1:24 names the phenomenon directly: the Lord’s revelations were given “unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding.” Revelation being mediated does not mean it is not real.

Prophets and leaders have promised that they will “never lead us astray,” but they are not claiming total infallibility here — only with respect to the essentials (I would argue, the covenantal essentials) of the gospel. This is demonstrated by Joseph Fielding Smith, who was one of the stronger perpetrators of this type of black-and-white language yet was clearly wrong on occasion: He famously stated “I don’t even think the Lord will let men get to the moon” (according to Joseph Fielding McConkie, “On Second Thought: Growing up as a son of Bruce R. McConkie”) and then later he certainly acknowledged that men had landed on the moon when the Apollo 15 astronauts visited Utah on 14 September 1971 and presented him with a Utah flag that they had carried with them across the lunar surface.

If revelation can redirect or overturn prior prophetically-guided understanding, then present teaching is held with something less than final certainty. Modern science is a direct parallel to this iterative and occasionally backtracking process of development: I believe President Oaks nodded at this in his first address as president of the Church at a BYU devotional, when he acknowledged the “evolving understanding of science and the sometimes incomplete teachings of religion” side by side. This is not a concession to be managed; it is the structure of faith in an open canon. The Saint acts on the best light presently given, judges it partly by its fruits, and holds it open to further correction.

Ben Spackman puts the point memorably:

“Paradoxically, it is by recognizing and understanding the presence of the human that my faith in the divine is preserved.”²²

What CND Actually Claims

From that starting point, Covenantal Non-Dogmatism makes a more limited claim than full theories and models of doctrine do. It is not a master key that dissolves every ambiguity. It is an attempt to say, as plainly as I can, what kinds of things the Church actually binds dogmatically, what kinds of things it teaches authoritatively without closing them forever, and what kinds of questions remain truly open. Dogmatic binding is not the same as eternal truth. CND is a prolegomenon to a theory of doctrine: a second-order, covenantal account of ecclesial bindingness in Latter-day Saint life, meant to explain how revelation, authority, orthodoxy, and orthopraxy combine to give teachings different kinds of force. A fuller theory of doctrine could then ask, on that basis, how teachings are identified, ranked, corrected, and received.

First, a clarification on covenant, since the term carries much of the argumentative weight that follows. In a Latter-day Saint context, a covenant is not a general disposition of loyalty or a synonym for gospel-life broadly, but rather a relationship with stipulated parties (the Saint and the Lord, mediated through authorized priesthood order), entered through ordinance, renewed or examined through recognized ecclesial forms, and carrying identifiable consequences for standing and participation. The baptismal covenant, the sacramental covenant, temple covenants, and priesthood covenants all have this character. Not every meaningful practice or relationship in the Church counts as a covenant in this sense, and the narrowness of the category is doing real work: it is what makes the covenantal boundary institutionally legible rather than endlessly elastic. A reader can identify much of the Church’s present covenantal floor by looking to canonized ordinance texts, interview questions, liturgical practice, and the specified terms attached to covenantal life.

With that in place, CND makes four claims:

1. There is a real and dogmatic covenantal boundary. The Church sets actual terms for baptism, confirmation, temple worship, common fellowship, and authorized teaching. These terms are not imaginary, and they are not trivial.

2. The boundary is historically located and revisable. It is whatever the living Church presently requires and authorizes, not a timeless list floating above history. It can change by revelation, clarification, or institutional development. In an open canon, under a fallibilist epistemology, that is not a defect but exactly what one should expect.²³

3. The boundary is more than behavior but less than a catechism. Latter-day Saint belonging does involve propositions: faith in God and Christ, testimony of the Restoration, acceptance of prophetic leadership, repentance, and willingness to enter covenant. But compared with classical creedal traditions, the required propositions remain broad, while the required conformity is far more liturgical, ethical, and communal than metaphysically exhaustive.

4. Everything outside the boundary is not therefore unimportant. Some teachings are authoritative and deserve deep seriousness even if they are not permanent tests of fellowship. Some questions sit close to the covenantal center. Others remain open to real disagreement.

What marks something as covenantal rather than merely authoritative? This is an epistemologically dense question that would require a much longer essay, but several markers cluster: it is enacted in ordinance or liturgy, named explicitly in baptismal or temple interview questions, taught universally across stakes, wards and generations rather than in one region or era, and promulgated to the whole body (furnished, in practice, to the worldwide Church in its own languages rather than left to reside in the English-language archive). No single marker is decisive; together they track the concrete ways the Church actually binds communion rather than the theological commitments it happens to emphasize. The markers are a cluster rather than a criterion — the plural structure whose epistemological credentials were defended in the survey above — and they are themselves a fallibilist instrument, not a covert catechism: heuristic, revisable, and expected to return partial or contested verdicts in hard cases. That is by design: a graded judgment degrades gracefully where a binary test shatters. Any reader worried that the covenantal/authoritative line gets drawn retrospectively to spare embarrassment can check it against the current interview questions, canon, and ordinances.

The last of these tentative markers, promulgation, deserves a further word, because it supplies what the others lack: an empirical check anyone can run. In the canon-law traditions (say Catholicism for example), a law does not bind until it is promulgated; no one can be held to a norm that was never furnished to them. Translation is promulgation at the scale of a global church, and it leaves a public record. The Church cannot covenantally bind the worldwide body to content it does not give the worldwide body, and what it gives is documented, language by language, in its own publishing program. The test runs in only one direction: broad translation proves little by itself, since the General Handbook is synchronized across dozens of languages for administrative reasons and the global magazines carry practical counsel alongside apostolic teaching. But narrow translation is strong negative evidence. A teaching that lives only in the English-language archive — an old institute manual, an untranslated monograph, a conference talk from two generations ago — cannot be functioning as a present test of Latter-day Saint identity, because the Church demonstrably does not expect most of its members ever to encounter it. And the translation program is an unusually useful heuristic/witness precisely because it is an administrative artifact rather than a theological statement: it records what the institution actually does under real constraints of money, time, and personnel. Its revealed preferences under scarcity are telling. At the outer edge of the program, the Church translates the scriptures, current general conference, ordinance and sacrament materials, and the core doctrinal chapters of its missionary manual first, and defers nearly everything else.²⁴ When the institution can promulgate only a little, what it promulgates is the covenantal floor.

The current baptismal interview is where covenantal simplicity is most visible. It asks for belief in God the Eternal Father and Jesus Christ, belief that the gospel has been restored through Joseph Smith, belief that the current President of the Church is a prophet of God, repentance, and willingness to live concrete commandments. Meditate on this: this is a real normative structure, and it is strikingly simple. The propositions required for entry into communion are few and stated at a remarkably high level of generality; the Church does not require a technically specified metaphysics of the Godhead, revelation, scripture, or creation at the threshold of belonging. Entry into the Church, temple worthiness, and authorization to teach in the Church’s name are distinct thresholds, and Mormon normativity visibly thickens as one ascends them. The temple recommend interview asks more than the baptismal interview does — sustaining the Church’s officers by name, honesty in one’s dealings, no affiliation with apostate groups — and, more strikingly, what it adds is weighted toward practice. The gradient is itself evidence for the thesis. Bindingness in the Church is not a switch but a slope, and at each step upward the increment is enacted covenant rather than expanded metaphysics. Even the thickest threshold falls well short of a creedal or catechetical system.

The canon anticipated this thinness long before any interview codified it. When the risen Lord declares “my doctrine” to the Nephites, the content is startlingly spare — faith in Christ, repentance, baptism, reception of the Holy Ghost — followed by a warning aimed squarely at the inflationary urge: “whoso shall declare more or less than this, and establish it for my doctrine, the same cometh of evil” (3 Nephi 11:31–40). Whatever else the passage means, and however the usage of the term ‘doctrine’ has evolved, it is remarkable that the clearest canonical definition of doctrine in Restoration scripture names the thin covenantal entry-core and attaches an Old Testament-style curse to padding it. Harrell took his title from this passage for good reason. The baptismal interview, whatever its institutional history, is recognizably an administration of the doctrine of Christ in very nearly this sense.

Seen comparatively, this is striking. Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy inherit a far thicker public doctrinal grammar than Mormonism does: creeds, councils, centuries of dogmatic development, and catechetical traditions that specify the content of the faith in much greater conceptual detail. Each tradition carries a different kind of burden.²⁵ Catholicism, by claiming doctrinal stability across time, carries a heavy historical-continuity burden: it must explain how current teaching is genuinely continuous with apostolic faith when the historical record often reads as development. The Restoration, by claiming continuing revelation under living prophets, carries a revelatory-authenticity burden: it must explain how Saints discern true inspiration from mistaken prophetic conviction, especially when earlier prophetic teaching is later revised. Neither burden is obviously lighter, and each tradition tends to be more articulate about its neighbor’s difficulty than about its own.²⁶ CND’s aim is to be honest about the Restoration’s actual burden rather than pretending it carries none.

CND’s central observation is this: a Latter-day Saint can remain fully inside the life of the Church while leaving open many theological questions that other apostolic settings have formally settled — not because Mormonism cares less about truth, but because it binds the Saints differently. It binds them first through covenants, repentance, worship, and service and only secondarily through a comparatively thin layer of required propositions. What the Church binds most firmly is not an exhaustive theological system but a covenantal form of life: ordinances, sustaining relationships, moral disciplines, and common worship under authorized priesthood order. That is why two members may hold very different views about cosmology, scriptural genre, divine embodiment, creation, or the mechanics of revelation while living the same covenants in good faith. The Church is not empty of normativity. It is normatively thick in covenantal practice and surprisingly spacious in theology.

This is a claim about ordering, not about the elimination of orthodoxy. The Church does care about right belief; it is not indifferent to what members think about God, Christ, the Restoration, or the scriptures. The claim is that in Mormonism orthodoxy is ordered toward orthopraxy rather than the reverse. The required propositions are few and broad; the required practices are specific, ordinance-bound, and regularly examined. The ratio is the point. What CND describes is not an absence of orthodoxy but an orthodoxy whose purpose is to make covenantal life and relation with God possible, rather than a covenantal life whose purpose is to deliver assent to a catechism.

Eugene England clarifies what CND is and is not.²⁷ He argues that the Church is “true because it is concrete, not theoretical” and calls it a “school of love.” The Church matters not only because it preserves authorized teachings and ordinances, but because it places us under forms of life in which truth must become patience, repentance, service, forgiveness, and charity. The Church does not merely tell us what is true; it trains us in the sort of living through which truth remakes a people. As England puts it:

“I believe that any good church is a school of love and that the LDS church, for most people, perhaps all, is the best one… not just because its doctrines teach and embody some of the great and central paradoxes but, more important, because the Church provides the best context for struggling with, working through, enduring, and being redeemed by those paradoxes and oppositions that give energy and meaning to the universe.”²⁸

Three quick objections deserve a direct answer before we examine the weightier arguments.

Does the thin revisable dogmatic layer, identified by the living Church’s present practice, make CND ‘circular’? Yes; and the circularity is neither embarrassing nor distinctive, because every ecclesiology that takes living authority seriously necessarily has this structure. Catholic magisterial authority defines what the magisterium teaches. Protestant sola scriptura traditions treat scripture as a canon that defines its own canon and interprets itself. Any tradition that declines to ground itself in a supposedly neutral external standard will end up with a loop somewhere. The relevant question is not whether there is circularity but whether the loop is honest about what it is. CND claims the loop forthrightly: the boundary is identified by the currently practicing Church, and it is historically located, revisable, and accountable to further revelation. That is a different claim from disguising the boundary as an eternal essence that was always obvious.

“You’re just redefining doctrine so the Church never has to admit it has been wrong.” This conflates two layers of claim. First-order claims are what the Church actually teaches; second-order claims are accounts of how such teachings are held, transmitted, and revised. Every religious tradition carries both, and every tradition refines its second-order account over time. Newman’s theory of development in Catholicism — which recently earned him canonization as a Doctor of the Church — is a second-order move, as are Protestant theories of scriptural sufficiency.²⁹ Second-order refinement does not invalidate first-order claims any more than developing metamathematics makes arithmetic false. The test of CND is not whether it shields prior teaching from hard questions (it cannot, as the priesthood and temple restriction shows plainly) but whether it accurately describes how the Church actually binds. That is something the reader can check.

“Then CND is a sociology of authority, not a theology of doctrine.” Partly, and deliberately. CND is a deontic account, not an alethic one: this means it tells the Saint what the Church presently binds normatively (what must be affirmed, enacted, taught, or held open in order to remain in covenant) not which propositions are timelessly true. The two can come apart; the pre-1978 restriction proves it with McConkie’s famous quote: “Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation.” But this is not a defect smuggled in at the end. It is the thesis, and under fallibilism it is the only honest place to start. Boundaries can be wrong, and an epistemically serious account expects that, just as virtually all modern epistemology expects well-grounded beliefs to remain corrigible. If prophets are truly fallible, we cannot pick and choose which things they are fallible in regards to: they can simply be wrong, period. What would actually be suspicious is a second-order account that guaranteed the present boundary tracks eternal truth perfectly, and that guarantee is precisely what the historical record refuses to underwrite. The relationship between what presently binds and what is finally true is the question a full theory of doctrine (and theology proper) must take up next, equipped with the revelatory epistemology sketched above. A prolegomenon that pretended to deliver alethic guarantees would just be a catechism in disguise.

A tradition committed to fullness, abundance, and “all that the Father hath” will almost inevitably feel messier than a closed system designed for tidiness. That messiness is not a regrettable side effect. It is the cost of refusing to trade revelation for neatness.

Hard Cases

A prolegomenon to a theory of doctrine only matters if it can survive the historical outliers that make people nervous — the same cases that broke the model families above, now examined at full length.

Adam-God. Brigham Young taught it forcefully, and for a time it even entered temple instruction — the lecture at the veil in the St. George era. A teaching enacted in liturgy cannot be casually dismissed as pulpit speculation. And yet it was never canonized, never incorporated into the interview standards governing membership or temple worthiness, contested by apostolic contemporaries during Young’s own lifetime, and ultimately left behind rather than carried forward. A binary epistemology (doctrine or not-doctrine, revealed or invented, fallible or infallible) has nothing useful to say about a case like this. It must either declare a prophet’s temple-taught theology “never really doctrine,” which is exactly the retrospective cleanup this essay refuses, or admit a permanent dogma the Church has since repudiated, which is false. The problem lies in the binary itself. Teachings in a living tradition can carry real but partial, contested, and temporary institutional force, partial truth and genuine misunderstanding, and saying so is not a fudge; it is the more accurate description of the evidence, and the more epistemically rigorous one. Naive infallibility models purchase their clean yes-or-no answers by misdescribing the kind of thing they are studying. What the episode demonstrates is that even prominent, even liturgically enacted, prophetic teaching does not automatically consolidate into permanent dogma. This is what is expected in a world of fallible prophets, as explained above.

The Word of Wisdom. If Adam-God shows a teaching moving out of the covenantal boundary, the Word of Wisdom shows one moving in; and the traffic pattern matters as much as either case alone. The revelation announces itself as “not by commandment or constraint” (D&C 89:2), and for most of the nineteenth century it functioned exactly that way: counsel, unevenly observed, including by the leaders who preached it. Its consolidation into a boundary was gradual — urged with increasing firmness by successive presidents, tied to temple recommends in the early twentieth century, and finally settled into the interview standard the Saints now take for granted. There is no single canonized moment marking the transition; that is Spackman’s sola revelatione point. Yet the canonized text still carries its “not by commandment” preamble, and parts of its positive counsel carry no institutional force at all, while abstinence from coffee functions today as a serious covenantal boundary. A static taxonomy must either read the current boundary back into 1833 or deny that today’s recommend question really binds. CND can simply describe what happened: counsel became covenant through the living exercise of the keys, unevenly, over decades, without a thunderclap. Set beside Adam-God, the case completes the picture — boundary traffic runs in both directions, which is precisely what the second claim above predicts and what no timeless inventory can accommodate. (It is also, not incidentally, the case behind Faulconer’s title: why a Mormon won’t drink coffee but might have a Coke.)

The priesthood and temple restriction. This case cannot be handled cleanly, and any theory that makes it look clean should be distrusted. The restriction was institutionally binding for generations and defended by theological explanations that many leaders and members treated as doctrinally sound. A 1949 First Presidency statement defended the ban as doctrinal, but in a conversation with Sterling McMurrin, President McKay said, “It is a practice, not a doctrine, and the practice will some day be changed,” indicating a shift in opinion. Later, the restriction itself was removed by revelation, and the Church explicitly disavowed the racial theories used to explain it. David O. McKay felt that only a revelation could end the ban, saying “I’ve inquired of the Lord repeatedly. The last time I did it was late last night. I was told, with no discussion, not to bring the subject up with the Lord again; that the time will come, but it will not be my time, and to leave the subject alone.”

CND must not solve this by pretending the earlier justifications were obviously “mere speculation” all along (even though in retrospect they were in fact clearly inherited from faulty American Protestant eisegesis). The harder lesson is that institutional practice, authoritative teaching, and eternal truth can come apart badly enough to require later repair. That is not the same as saying the Church had fallen into wholesale apostasy. Read this way, the case warns us against treating durable teaching as identical with timeless essence. Nothing about that observation undoes the harm that was done.

CND must be honest about where this case sits on its own map. By the markers offered above — enacted in ordinance-adjacent practice, taught universally across stakes, with disaffirmation carrying serious institutional consequences — the pre-1978 restriction functioned as a covenantal boundary, not merely as authoritative teaching. If that reading is right, then CND cannot claim that covenantal boundaries are self-certifying or incapable of later correction. The account is committed to a harder and more honest conclusion: covenantal boundaries themselves can, in retrospect, be recognized as having been wrongly drawn,³⁰ and the Church’s capacity for repair runs through revelation to present authority rather than through any guarantee that present practice was always right. This is the most demanding thing my account has to carry. It must carry it, because any weaker version would quietly reintroduce the retrospective cleanup the rest of this essay criticizes. I believe this is what is required of a mentally mature Saint capable of living with ambiguity, the kind detailed in Bruce C. Hafen’s classic essay on dealing with uncertainty.³¹

But the hardest question here is not classificatory, and it deserves to be faced in the first person: what did this structure ask of the Saint who stood inside the boundary while it stood — the Black Latter-day Saint denied the temple, or the member who correctly believed, decades before 1978, that the restriction was error? An account that answered “patience” and nothing more would deserve the charge of counseling quietism toward injustice. CND’s answer is more specific, and it follows from the thinness the essay has been describing. Because the Church’s propositional floor was thin, the restriction’s rationales were never covenantally binding: no interview ever asked a member to affirm the curse-of-Cain folklore or the premortal-neutrality speculation, and Saints as visible as Lowell Bennion simply declined to believe or teach them without ever leaving the covenant.³² Because the boundary was known to be revisable, hope was doctrinally licensed rather than disloyal: Eugene England could argue in print, five years before the revelation, that the restriction was a burden the whole Church bore and that the Saints could faithfully pray and labor for its end — precisely because nothing in the covenant had declared it eternal. Because truth-telling is not apostasy, Lester Bush could assemble the documentary record of the practice’s merely institutional origins, scholarship widely credited with at the very least helping prepare the ground for 1978. And because what bound was covenant rather than creed, covenant community across the boundary remained possible and real: the Genesis Group, organized in 1971 under Black Latter-day Saint leaders with apostolic sanction, and behind it the longer witness of Jane Manning James, who spent decades petitioning the First Presidency for the temple blessings withheld from her and remained a Saint to her death.³³ The deontic structure did not counsel quietism. It marked out the forms faithful labor could take — disbelief of the folklore, scholarship, petition, hope, and community — everything short of rupture.

Carlfred Broderick, writing about a far smaller collision of his own with the Brethren, articulated the underlying logic with a candor that deserves to be quoted whole. Having searched his soul, he could find only two possibilities: either the Brethren were exercising their appointed duty and legitimately calling him back from a wrong path, or they “were reacting to my work from a position of differing cultural and generational background, rather than revelation; but in that case I would consider it my duty to make the Abrahamic sacrifice and sustain them anyway, as I have, after all, covenanted to do. I could not, for myself, entertain any third alternative.”³⁴ That is the covenantal bond doing exactly what this essay claims it does: holding even under the Saint’s own live hypothesis that the teaching is human. (Broderick’s own paragraphs on the restriction, in the same essay, take the more deferential line — the priesthood belongs to God, not to us — which is itself evidence of the range of postures the covenant leaves open to the faithful.) Two honest limits remain, and they must be stated rather than implied. This catalogue of licensed labor was no substitute for justice, and for those who bore the restriction it did not pretend to be: the account describes what held them, not what compensated them. And when repair came, it came partly through these very labors — the scholarship, the petitions, the persistence of Genesis, a prophet’s own pleading at the altar — which is what “correction from within continuing covenantal order” means when it stops being an abstraction.

The plurality of Gods and divine progression. Even the strongest proponents of this idea will acknowledge LDS tradition has never been univocal on the metaphysics involved here. The King Follett Discourse and the Sermon in the Grove developed a theology of God as a progressed being, contrary to Joseph Smith’s earliest clearly monotheistic inclinations. Lorenzo Snow’s couplet — “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may become” — was repeated from pulpits for well over a century. Gordon B. Hinckley’s 1997 remark that he did not know that the Church currently teaches or emphasizes the first half of the couplet marks the beginning of a real shift in emphasis that culminates in the 2014 Becoming Like God essay’s aggressive agnosticism: “Little has been revealed about the first half of this couplet, and consequently little is taught … Church members imagine exaltation less through images of what they will get and more through the relationships they have now and how those relationships might be purified and elevated.”

Further complicating the picture, countercurrents have run through the tradition from its earliest decades. While he endorsed a form of regress, Orson Pratt somewhat confusingly also argued against a progressing God and defended something closer to a complete, omniscient Deity — one of the flashpoints of the Pratt-Young controversies.³⁵ (The twist worth noticing: Pratt lost the short battle and won the long war. Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie, the great mid-century codifiers, landed closer to Pratt than to Young on whether God progresses in knowledge and power; while confusingly still endorsing some form of regression.) B. H. Roberts developed yet another alternative in The Seventy’s Course in Theology and the unpublished The Truth, The Way, The Life: a horizontal pluralism in which God exists alongside co-eternal uncreated intelligences, operating within eternal law rather than focused on a vertical ancestral chain. A regression of Gods was at most a footnote or quite literally an appendix to his model (see the second edition). Sterling McMurrin extended a broadly Jamesian pluralistic reading in 1965, during the very period when correlated materials were consolidating a simpler grammar. The tradition has always carried more than one answer to the question King Follett raised. What has been softened is not a single uncontested doctrine but a particular reading of a particular sermon, within a conversation that has run, with real internal disagreement, the whole history of the Church.

The structural point is clean: none of these views — Young’s, Pratt’s, Roberts’s, McMurrin’s — was ever canonized, ever placed in baptismal or temple interviews, ever made the object of a required confession. They also fail the promulgation test in the present tense: the most explicit formulations of divine progression and future spirit parenthood now live almost entirely in the English-language archive (an institute manual here, a mid-century synthesis there) while the materials the Church actually furnishes to its members in a hundred languages pass over the mechanism in silence. Birch’s magisterium via neglectum is not just a clever phrase; retirement by omission leaves a visible trace in the translation record. A convert whose whole religious world consists of the translated scriptures, current conference, Come, Follow Me, and the temple could live an entire covenantal life without ever encountering the elaborated teaching — and it would be absurd to call such a Saint deficient for an omission that is the Church’s own.

The King Follett Discourse itself was framed largely as exegesis of John 5:19 rather than as “thus saith the Lord” revelation. This is, tellingly, how a member of the First Presidency has himself handled the discourse. In “Trust in the Lord” (October 2019), President Dallin H. Oaks invoked the very cautions from Elders Christofferson and Andersen relied upon throughout this essay and then applied them to the King Follett sermon directly — reaffirming a single proposition from it, that righteous family members will be together in the world of spirits, precisely because it “has been frequently taught by his successors” up to this day, while passing over the sermon’s more speculative cosmological claims. Other claims in the sermon may have been taught frequently throughout history, but are hard to find recently. A senior apostle thus treats one historical discourse not as an indivisible doctrinal package but as a text from which particular propositions earn ongoing official status through repeated prophetic affirmation — exactly the distinction this essay presses between the historical importance of a discourse and the present doctrinal standing of particular teachings drawn from it.

On the markers given above, the metaphysics and specifics of divine progression would be considered a contested authoritative teaching, never a covenantal boundary; which is precisely why the tradition could carry beautiful internal pluralism on the question without fracturing. Rather than being a hard question doctrinal models must sweat through, the theological mystery of a regression of Gods showcases exactly the type of pluralistic thought that Covenantal Non-Dogmatism rejoices in. The current softening of speculative progression language is not a dogmatic reversal; it is a further move within a long internal conversation, and the covenantal structure of the Church has not shifted on its account. Why the softening happened (further light, pastoral prudence, ecumenical sensitivity, or something else) is a question for theology proper rather than for this prolegomenon.

A case still in motion. Most of the cases above have already been graded by history: the traffic has settled, the verdicts are legible, and the analyst risks nothing by describing them. Honesty requires naming the live case most readers will want to run: the proclamation on the family, issued by the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve in 1995. This essay will not adjudicate its standing, and the refusal is principled rather than evasive: predicting where a living process will settle is precisely the alethic overreach this essay has criticized in every model that attempted it. What the framework can honestly offer is a description of the question’s actual shape. By the markers, the proclamation presents the most instructive mixed profile in the contemporary Church. It is promulgated maximally — translated into scores of languages, framed in members’ homes, quoted continually in general conference and curriculum — and parts of its content are not merely taught but covenantally enacted: the sealing ordinance itself performs the marriage the proclamation describes, and the law of chastity it restates is examined in every recommend interview. Yet it remains uncanonized after three decades, and the institution’s own descriptions of its status have subtly oscillated — famously, President Packer’s spoken 2010 characterization of it as qualifying “according to the definition as a revelation” was revised for printed publication of his General Conference talk to “a guide that members of the Church would do well to read and to follow,” while President Oaks in 2017 called it “a statement of eternal truth, the will of the Lord.”³⁶ The oscillation is the datum. Advocates on both sides demand the binary — eternal doctrine or mere policy statement, decided now — and the apostles themselves have declined to issue that binary in unison. On CND’s account this is not a scandal but the expected signature of a teaching whose institutional career is still being written, and being written the way the Word of Wisdom’s was: through decades of reaffirmation, enactment, and incorporation rather than a single classificatory thunderclap. Note carefully what the framework does not say. To observe that a career is in motion is not a demotion. The Word of Wisdom spent eight decades as counsel before consolidating into a boundary, and the proclamation’s trajectory to date — sustained apostolic reaffirmation, liturgical enactment of its core, interview examination of its stipulations — is the observable profile of consolidation, not recession. What CND declines to predict is the destination; what it identifies is the evidence that will reveal it — canonization or its continued absence, interview language, ordinance practice, and what the Church furnishes to the worldwide body across the coming decades. The reader may run the test as the record accumulates, which is more than any binary taxonomy can offer.

Many additional questions nearer and farther from the center are easy to find. Some live questions remain clearly open in practice: creation and evolution, the age of the earth, the precise metaphysics of spirit, the mechanics of scriptural production. Other questions sit closer to the covenantal center because they touch the Restoration’s own self-understanding. Even there, the Church requires testimony and loyalty more than a fully specified theory. Members are not asked to affirm one detailed model of scriptural translation, prophetic psychology, or historical development. CND is therefore not flat. It recognizes degrees of proximity to the covenantal center without pretending that every question reduces to a yes-or-no checklist.

The Gift of Theological Pluralism

One reason CND is needed is that it explains — and lets us rejoice in — two features of Latter-day Saint life that are usually treated as separate curiosities: the tradition’s persistent preference for practice over propositional precision, and the almost explosive amount of theological pluralism it can sustain without ceasing to be itself. These two features are really one structure seen from two sides. Because the Church binds through a covenantal form of life rather than a catechism, its seriousness concentrates in practice; and because its seriousness concentrates in practice, its theology is free to breathe.

Neither feature is a modern accommodation. The priority of practice is the canon’s own epistemology. “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine” (John 7:17): the Savior puts the doing before the knowing. Alma’s great discourse on faith is not an argument to be assented to but an experiment to be run (plant the word, nourish it, taste it) with belief growing out of enacted trial rather than preceding it (Alma 32). King Benjamin locates the knowledge of God in service (Mosiah 2:17), and James defines pure religion by what it does (James 1:27). In Mormonism, practice is the organ of theological knowledge, not the application of a theology worked out elsewhere.

The pluralism, likewise, was a boast before it was ever an embarrassment. In January 1843, Joseph Smith identified the refusal of creedal closure as the Restoration’s distinguishing mark: “The most prominent difference in sentiment between the Latter-day Saints and sectarians was, that the latter were all circumscribed by some peculiar creed, which deprived its members the privilege of believing anything not contained therein, whereas the Latter-day Saints have no creed, but are ready to believe all true principles that exist, as they are made manifest from time to time” (History of the Church, 5:215). Creeds, he complained elsewhere, “set up stakes, and say, ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further’” — a fence the God of continuing revelation declines to build. The Brigham Young sermon with which this essay closes is the same charter one generation on: gather truth from every sect, every science, every nation, and bring it home to Zion. The founders did not merely tolerate theological openness. They advertised it.

And the tradition has continuously produced Saints who understood this and were honored for it. Lowell Bennion spent half a century teaching that the weightier matters of the gospel are ethical rather than metaphysical — that a religion is finally known by how it treats the widow, the student, the stranger, and the boy at the ranch rather than by the precision of its speculations about the eternities — and he remains one of the most beloved teachers the Church has produced, which says something about what the community itself recognizes as central.³⁷ Eugene England, whose “school of love” already anchors this essay, belongs to the same lineage: he edited Bennion’s selected writings, a fact that documents the succession better than any argument could — as does James Faulconer, whose account of the Church’s “atheological” character stands behind this whole argument.³⁸ Terryl Givens has shown across the whole sweep of LDS intellectual history that the theology has always been internally plural, and that the culture lives on its paradoxes — certainty and searching, authority and individualism — rather than resolving them.³⁹ And Adam Miller may be the most instructive case of all: a serious, ambitious Latter-day Saint theologian who begins by disclaiming any authority for his own work. Theology, in Miller’s hands, is an experiment in thinking charitably — work each generation must do again from scratch, binding no one. This is what theology looks like when he knows exactly where the covenantal floor is and builds freely above it.⁴⁰

The outside witness agrees with the inside argument. Jan Shipps, the most distinguished non-Latter-day Saint scholar of Mormonism, spent her career describing a religion in which belonging and doing carry the weight that confessing carries elsewhere.⁴¹ She had no apologetic stake in that description; it is simply what the tradition looks like when observed carefully from without — which is worth remembering against the suspicion that an account like CND is special pleading invented after the fact.

The hard cases of the last section change their aspect when revisited from this vantage. The Pratt–Young controversies, Roberts’s cosmology, and McMurrin’s pluralism are, from here, not merely problems a taxonomy must survive but the gift working as intended: a tradition confident enough in its covenantal spine to let its best minds disagree about the eternities without disturbing the table they shared. Blake Ostler’s three-volume philosophical theology, which (as he would agree) precisely no one is bound to accept, is a modern monument of the same kind.⁴²

The global Church is this same structure at scale. What a Saint in Accra shares with a Saint in Ulaanbaatar and a Saint in Provo is not a theological library — the promulgation record shows most of the library has never been furnished in most of the Church’s languages — but baptism, the sacrament, the temple, callings, covenants, and current prophetic direction. Lived Mormonism worldwide is already covenantally united and theologically plural, not as a compromise wrung from the institution but as the ordinary condition of a body that binds by ordinance rather than by catechism.

None of this is relativism, and none of it makes right belief unimportant; the ordering claim above stands — orthodoxy in Mormonism exists to make covenantal life possible. Saints can think ambitiously and differently about creation, divine embodiment, scriptural genre, foreordination, grace and works, deification, spirit matter, the number and nature of the Gods, the existence and role of a Heavenly Mother, the mechanics of revelation, or the meaning of Zion without treating every disagreement as a crisis of fellowship, because what holds them together is not agreement but covenant: they partake of the sacrament together, serve together, repent together, sustain the same priesthood order, and seek the same Christ even while theorizing differently. That is one of the happiest consequences of an open canon: the Restoration has left room for an explosion of joyful theological growth and creativity as part of the process of slowly iterating on further light and truth.

How One Navigates

CND is not a permission slip for apathy. It is a way of navigating without pretending that the map is a catechism.

In practice, Latter-day Saints already navigate by exactly the epistemic pluralism the model-builders kept rediscovering — weighing several bearings rather than computing one master criterion: scripture, current prophetic teaching, ordinances, the broader inherited tradition, spiritual confirmation, rational coherence, lived fruits, and the actual boundaries the Church presently sets. The Church’s own guides are heuristic rather than scholastic. Doctrine and Covenants 9 and 88 give a process of study, seeking, and confirmation. The 2007 Newsroom statement gives simple public advice equally useful to journalists and members. Christofferson explains how doctrine is established and, crucially, reminds us that “the objective is not simply consensus among council members but revelation from God. It is a process involving both reason and faith for obtaining the mind and will of the Lord.” Bednar distinguishes doctrine, principles, and applications for teaching and discipleship. These bearings do not always point cleanly in one direction. Sometimes that is because we are confused. Often it is because the tradition really is unfinished.

And because the Church is not a debating society but a covenantal community, this navigation is never only intellectual. As England says, the life of the Church offers “constant opportunities for all to serve, especially to learn to serve people we would not normally choose to serve… and thus opportunities to learn to love unconditionally.” The search for truth in Mormonism is not just a matter of arranging propositions correctly. It is inseparable from the ordinances, disciplines, and relationships through which hearts are changed.

A member can see this at work in ordinary, non-exotic questions. One can observe the quiet evolution of the Word of Wisdom, notice changes in temple language across time, or watch leaders speak differently about biological evolution, and still ask a more exact question than “Is this doctrine or not?” The better question is: what, here, has the Church bound me to affirm, enact, refrain from teaching in its name, or hold open while further light remains possible?

That question requires one further distinction. A teaching may be presently binding without being unrevisable, and it may later be judged mistaken without ceasing to have carried real institutional force at the time. The Saint’s task is therefore neither to pretend that present authority is weightless nor to collapse obedience into a guarantee of timeless correctness. It is to live truthfully under the Church’s present order while remaining morally serious, spiritually awake, and open to further light. In acute cases of tension, conscience still matters; but in a covenantal church conscience is not a private veto that dissolves common order. It is one of the places where patience, honesty, endurance, and prayer are most severely tested — and the restriction case above catalogued what that testing has actually looked like in Latter-day Saint lives, and how wide a range of faithful forms it can take.

The discipline of an open-canon faith is not to eliminate ambiguity too quickly. It is to remain truthful, faithful, and teachable within it.

Cultural Complications

An obvious objection: if Mormonism is so non-dogmatic, why does it so often feel dogmatic?

Because culture is real. So are curriculum, family expectations, educational institutions, hiring decisions, local leadership styles, and the social cost of heterodoxy. Public theological dissent is often treated institutionally as behavior rather than mere opinion, because in Mormonism speech itself may be understood as an act of sustaining or resisting authorized order. Belief, speech, loyalty, and practice are not neatly separable.

CND therefore describes the logic of normativity in the tradition more than every local instance of enforcement. That is not a weakness; it is one of the things the model helps us see. Modern Mormonism lives with a recurring tension between canonical openness and cultural closure. Ignore the formal openness, and we misdescribe the church. Ignore the lived closure, and we romanticize it.

There are also understandable reasons the institution narrows the word doctrine. A global church needs shared language, guardrails against private speculation, and public clarity about what may be taught in its name. CND does not reject that impulse. It argues that prudent institutional narrowing must not be mistaken for a final theological closure the Restoration itself has never claimed.

Conclusion

Many Latter-day Saint faith crises are not caused simply by encountering difficult facts. They are intensified by carrying the wrong expectations about what kind of church the Restoration is supposed to be. If one expects a hidden catechism that can be carefully but precisely pieced together, the historical record is destabilizing. However, if one expects a living covenantal community whose theology remains partly unfinished, the same record looks different. Not easier, necessarily — but intelligible.

Covenantal Non-Dogmatism does not say that doctrine does not matter. It says that doctrine in Mormonism does not function as a closed propositional inventory. It functions through a layered structure of covenant, authority, teaching, ordinance, and ongoing inquiry. The Church really binds; it simply does not bind everything in the same way.

To this point the argument has been descriptive: this is how the Church actually binds, and the reader can check it. But the structure deserves more than description, because there are reasons to call it good and not merely actual. First, it is epistemically honest. Though it is certainly the dominant model in current philosophical discourse, fallibilism is not a fashionable concession; it is the condition of mortal knowers, prophets included, and a church that binds provisionally is calibrated to what embodied, historically situated human beings can actually know. A church that binds irreformably must either never err or build machinery for never admitting that it has. Second, CND locates unity where human beings can genuinely share it. A community can hold a table, an ordinance, a covenant, and a ministry in common far more durably than it can hold a metaphysics in common; the history of creedal Christianity suggests that exhaustive doctrinal uniformity has been purchasable only at the price of schism, coercion, or both. Third, it makes repair possible without rupture. The 1978 revelation corrected a wrongly drawn boundary from within continuing covenantal order — painful, late, and no consolation for the harm done, but structurally possible, where closed systems make correction traumatic by design. Fourth, it honors agency. A covenantal structure asks for trust enacted in practice while leaving the mind free to grow, which is a more demanding and more respectful thing to ask of a soul than assent to a finished list.

There is, then, something exhilarating about a religious tradition built like this. It asks more of the soul than simple assent and grants more room than a creed. It demands covenantal seriousness without pretending that every theological question has been settled. It permits real authority, real belonging, real correction, and real surprise. And it demands precision in return: to distinguish eternal truth from present policy, authoritative teaching from permanent dogma, covenantal loyalty from exhaustive theological uniformity, and cultural pressure from actual ecclesiastical requirement — to be serious without becoming rigid, open without becoming indifferent, and faithful without pretending that God finished speaking as soon as we became uncomfortable.

An open canon and a non-dogmatic stance are demanding. They ask the Saint to act on the best light presently given while holding it open to correction, to remain teachable without becoming indifferent, and to seek further understanding without forcing the tradition into premature closure. The foundation is covenantal; what gets built on top of it — frameworks, theologies, accounts of doctrine — is the proper labor of disciples. The unfinishedness of Mormon doctrine is not an embarrassment to manage. It is part of the shape of the faith, and one of its glories.

“It was the occupation of Jesus Christ and his Apostles to propagate the Gospel of salvation and the principles of eternal life to the world, and it is our duty and calling, as ministers of the same salvation and Gospel, to gather every item of truth and reject every error. Whether a truth be found with professed infidels, or with the Universalists, or the Church of Rome, or the Methodists, the Church of England, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Quakers, the Shakers, or any other of the various and numerous different sects and parties, all of whom have more or less truth, it is the business of the Elders of this Church (Jesus, their elder brother, being at their head), to gather up all the truths in the world pertaining to life and salvation, to the Gospel we preach, to mechanism of every kind, to the sciences, and to philosophy, wherever it may be found in every nation, kindred, tongue, and people, and bring it to Zion.”

— Brigham Young, Discourses of Brigham Young, 248, emphasis added.

Further Reading

The literature this essay engages, organized by the role it plays in the argument. Works marked with an asterisk are the natural starting points in each category.

Models and frameworks of doctrine.

*Michael A. Goodman, “Oh Say, What Is Truth?: Approaches to Doctrine,” BYU Studies Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2021): 13–38. The most useful survey of the framework literature, including its analysis of how General Conference discourse itself deploys the word doctrine.

*Anthony Sweat, Michael Hubbard MacKay, and Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, “Doctrine: Models to Evaluate Types and Sources of Latter-day Saint Teachings,” Religious Educator 17, no. 3 (2016). The widely taught concentric-rings model.

Armand L. Mauss, “The Fading of the Pharaoh’s Curse: The Decline and Fall of the Priesthood Ban Against Blacks,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 14, no. 3 (Fall 1981): 11–45. Presents the four-tier “scale of authenticity” — canonical, official, authoritative, popular — explicitly as an operational construct derived from empirical induction rather than a theological one.

Robert L. Millet, “What Is Our Doctrine?” Religious Educator 4, no. 3 (2003). The overlapping-sources test: canon, current united teaching, current curriculum.

Nathan B. Oman, “Jurisprudence and the Problem of Church Doctrine,” Element: The Journal of the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology 2, no. 2 (Fall 2006). The jurisprudential hermeneutic; doctrine read the way a common-law tradition reads precedent.

D. Todd Christofferson, “The Doctrine of Christ,” April 2012 General Conference. The clearest apostolic account of how doctrine is established.

David A. Bednar, Increase in Learning (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2011). The doctrine–principles–applications taxonomy for teaching and discipleship.

“Approaching Mormon Doctrine,” Church Newsroom, May 4, 2007. The Church’s clearest public-facing heuristic.

Brian D. Birch, “Beyond the Canon: Authoritative Discourse in Comparative Perspective.” Maps LDS authority structures onto Catholic magisterial categories; coins magisterium via neglectum.

James B. Allen, “Line Upon Line,” Ensign, July 1979. Foundational on progressive understanding.

David F. Holland, “Revelation and the Open Canon in Mormonism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, ed. Terryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). The open canon as a structure in which scripture, prophets, and personal inspiration each limit the others.

The historical record any model must survive.

*Charles R. Harrell, “This Is My Doctrine”: The Development of Mormon Doctrine (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2011). The documentary ledger.

*Terryl L. Givens, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). The synthetic case that LDS theology has been internally plural from the beginning.

Thomas G. Alexander, “The Reconstruction of Mormon Doctrine: From Joseph Smith to Progressive Theology,” Sunstone 5, no. 4 (July–August 1980). The early-twentieth-century doctrinal transformation.

Lester E. Bush Jr., “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” Dialogue 8, no. 1 (Spring 1973). The scholarly treatment that reframed the priesthood restriction’s history.

Gary James Bergera, Conflict in the Quorum: Orson Pratt, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002). The Pratt–Young controversies in full.

B. H. Roberts, The Truth, The Way, The Life: An Elementary Treatise on Theology, ed. John W. Welch (Provo, UT: BYU Studies, 1994). Roberts’s horizontal pluralism.

Sterling M. McMurrin, The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1965). The Jamesian pluralistic reading.

Revelation, accommodation, and religious epistemology.

*Ben Spackman, various essays and presentations on accommodation, genre, and revelatory mediation; see benspackman.com for a curated bibliography. The sola revelatione critique and the “paradoxical preservation of faith.”

David F. Holland, “The Triangle and the Sovereign.” The open canon as a structure in which scripture, prophets, and personal inspiration each limit the others.

Blake T. Ostler, “The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source,” Dialogue 20, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 66–123. The expansion theory as a philosophical complement to accommodation.

Bruce C. Hafen, “On Dealing with Uncertainty,” BYU devotional, January 9, 1979; reprinted in the Ensign, August 1979. Ambiguity as a stage of mature discipleship.

John W. Welch, “Thy Mind, O Man, Must Stretch,” BYU devotional, May 17, 2011.

Covenant, practice, and community.

*Eugene England, “Why the Church Is As True As the Gospel,” Sunstone (1986); reprinted in the essay collection of the same title (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1986). The Church as a school of love.

*James E. Faulconer, “Why a Mormon Won’t Drink Coffee but Might Have a Coke: The Atheological Character of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” The most important prior treatment of the phenomenon this essay names.

Lowell L. Bennion, The Best of Lowell L. Bennion: Selected Writings 1928–1988, ed. Eugene England (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1988). The ethical core of the gospel, lived and taught for half a century.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theology (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2012). Theology that begins by disclaiming its own authority.

Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought, 3 vols. (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2001–2008). The modern monument of non-binding LDS philosophical theology.

Faithful labor inside contested boundaries.

*Carlfred Broderick, “The Core of My Faith,” in My Parents Married on a Dare and Other Favorite Essays on Life (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1996); originally in Philip L. Barlow, ed., A Thoughtful Faith (Cannon Press, 1986). The two-alternatives letter — covenant holding under the Saint’s own hypothesis of leaders’ error — and the vow to “differentiate the core of my faith from the extended corpus of my beliefs.”

Eugene England, “The Mormon Cross,” Dialogue 8, no. 1 (1973). Faithful hope and labor for the restriction’s end, five years before the revelation.

Quincy D. Newell, Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). The longest and costliest witness of covenant endurance inside a wrongly drawn boundary.

Mary Lythgoe Bradford, Lowell L. Bennion: Teacher, Counselor, Humanitarian (Salt Lake City: Dialogue Foundation, 1995). A life of declining the folklore while never leaving the covenant.

Armand L. Mauss, All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). The scholarly frame for how the racial teachings rose and receded.

Comparative and outside perspectives.

*Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). The outside witness.

John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). The paradigm second-order account in the Catholic tradition.

George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984). Doctrine as communal grammar rather than propositional inventory — the closest analogue to this essay’s thesis outside the Restoration.

Terryl L. Givens, People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). The culture living on its unresolved oppositions.

Philosophy of language (for the semantic argument).

Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). The causal-historical picture of reference.

Gareth Evans, “The Causal Theory of Names,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 47 (1973): 187–208. Reference change through shifted grounding; the “Madagascar” case.

Herman Cappelen, Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Conceptual drift and revision as a general phenomenon.

Epistemological fallibilism.

Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1963).

Charles S. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief” (1877), in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).

Bibliography

Alexander, Thomas G. “The Reconstruction of Mormon Doctrine: From Joseph Smith to Progressive Theology.” Sunstone 5, no. 4 (July–August 1980): 24–33.

Alston, William P. Beyond “Justification”: Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.

Bednar, David A. Increase in Learning. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2011.

Bennion, Lowell L. The Best of Lowell L. Bennion: Selected Writings 1928–1988. Edited by Eugene England. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1988.

Bergera, Gary James. Conflict in the Quorum: Orson Pratt, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002.

Birch, Brian D. “Beyond the Canon: Authoritative Discourse in Comparative Perspective.” In The Expanded Canon: Perspectives on Mormonism and Sacred Texts, edited by Blair G. Van Dyke, Brian D. Birch, and Boyd J. Petersen, 26–46. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2018.

Bradford, Mary Lythgoe. Lowell L. Bennion: Teacher, Counselor, Humanitarian. Salt Lake City: Dialogue Foundation, 1995.

Broderick, Carlfred. “The Core of My Faith.” In My Parents Married on a Dare and Other Favorite Essays on Life, 31–51. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1996. Originally published as “The Core of My Belief” in A Thoughtful Faith: Essays on Belief by Mormon Scholars, edited by Philip L. Barlow, 107–22. Centerville, UT: Canon Press, 1986.

Bush, Lester E., Jr. “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 8, no. 1 (Spring 1973): 11–68.

Cappelen, Herman. Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Christofferson, D. Todd. “The Doctrine of Christ.” Ensign, May 2012, 86–90.

Dahl, Larry E. “Authorship and History of the Lectures on Faith.” In The Lectures on Faith in Historical Perspective, edited by Larry E. Dahl and Charles D. Tate Jr., 1–20. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1990.

England, Eugene. “The Mormon Cross.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 8, no. 1 (Spring 1973): 78–86.

England, Eugene. “Why the Church Is As True As the Gospel.” Sunstone 11, no. 1 (January 1986): 22–25. Reprinted in Why the Church Is As True As the Gospel, 1–18. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1986.

Evans, Gareth. “The Causal Theory of Names.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 47 (1973): 187–208.

Faulconer, James E. “Why a Mormon Won’t Drink Coffee but Might Have a Coke: The Atheological Character of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Element: An International Journal of Mormon Philosophy and Theology 2, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 19–36.

Givens, Terryl L. People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Givens, Terryl L. Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Goodman, Michael A. “‘Oh Say, What Is Truth?’: Approaches to Doctrine.” BYU Studies Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2021): 13–38.

Hafen, Bruce C. “On Dealing with Uncertainty.” Ensign, August 1979, 63–67.

Harrell, Charles R. “This Is My Doctrine”: The Development of Mormon Doctrine. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2011.

Holland, David F. “Revelation and the Open Canon in Mormonism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, edited by Terryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow, 107–22. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Holland, David F. “The Triangle and the Sovereign: Logics, Histories, and an Open Canon.” In The Expanded Canon: Perspectives on Mormonism and Sacred Texts, edited by Blair G. Van Dyke, Brian D. Birch, and Boyd J. Petersen, 1–24. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2018.

Holland, Jeffrey R. “Lord, I Believe.” Ensign, May 2013, 93–95.

Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Kuhn, Thomas S. “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice.” In The Essential Tension, 320–39. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

Mauss, Armand L. “The Fading of the Pharaoh’s Curse: The Decline and Fall of the Priesthood Ban Against Blacks.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 14, no. 3 (Fall 1981): 11–45.

Miller, Adam S. Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theology. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2012.

Millet, Robert L. “What Is Our Doctrine?” Religious Educator 4, no. 3 (2003): 15–33.

Newell, Quincy D. Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Newman, John Henry. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. London: James Toovey, 1845.

Oaks, Dallin H. “The Plan and the Proclamation.” Ensign, November 2017, 28–31.

Oman, Nathan B. “Jurisprudence and the Problem of Church Doctrine.” Element: The Journal of the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology 2, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 1–19.

Ostler, Blake T. “The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 20, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 66–123.

Ostler, Blake T. Exploring Mormon Thought. 3 vols. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2001–2008.

Packer, Boyd K. “Cleansing the Inner Vessel.” Ensign, November 2010, 74–77.

Shipps, Jan. Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.

Smith, Joseph. History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Edited by B. H. Roberts. 7 vols. Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1902–1932.

Spackman, Ben. “A Paradoxical Preservation of Faith: LDS Creation Accounts and the Composite Nature of Revelation.” Address, FAIR Conference, August 2019.

Sweat, Anthony, Michael Hubbard MacKay, and Gerrit J. Dirkmaat. “Doctrine: Models to Evaluate Types and Sources of Latter-day Saint Teachings.” Religious Educator 17, no. 3 (2016): 101–25.

Webster, Noah. An American Dictionary of the English Language. New York: S. Converse, 1828.

Young, Brigham. Discourses of Brigham Young. Selected and arranged by John A. Widtsoe. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1954.

Footnotes

1. Smith is speaking with a smidge of hyperbole (he plainly held that some teachings bind), but the rhetorical instinct is the thesis of this essay: it is covenants, not creeds or intellectual assent to propositions, that hold the Church together. ↩

2. The tension between the 1835 minutes and the 1921 rationale is discussed in the scholarly literature on the Lectures; see Larry E. Dahl, “Authorship and History of the Lectures on Faith,” in The Lectures on Faith in Historical Perspective, ed. Larry E. Dahl and Charles D. Tate Jr. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1990), 1–20. ↩

3. A note on terminology: I use “dogma” in a broad sense — a non-negotiable, authoritative teaching that binds communion — rather than in the narrower Roman Catholic sense of an infallibly defined de fide proposition. Readers trained in creedal traditions should not hear “non-dogmatism” as “no binding belief.” The argument is about the comparatively limited nature of what the Church binds, not whether it does. ↩

4. The most important prior treatment of this phenomenon is James E. Faulconer, “Why a Mormon Won’t Drink Coffee but Might Have a Coke: The Atheological Character of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Element: An International Journal of Mormon Philosophy and Theology 2, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 19–36. Faulconer’s diagnosis is substantially correct and has shaped how this conversation is framed in LDS intellectual life; I am indebted to it. What follows builds on it rather than displacing it. Where Faulconer is diagnostic, I aim to be structural and constructive: to name the specific mechanism by which the Church binds (covenantal order rather than “practice” broadly construed), to identify the thin but real dogmatic floor that binding produces, and to argue that this structure is precisely what opens the spacious theological territory above it. Faulconer calls LDS religion atheological; I argue it is covenantally non-dogmatic — a framing that carries constructive possibilities the first does not. ↩

5. Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), s.v. “doctrine,” “In a general sense, whatever is taught… the principles or positions of any sect or master.” ↩

6. Michael A. Goodman, “‘Oh Say, What Is Truth?’: Approaches to Doctrine,” BYU Studies Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2021): 13–38. ↩

7. Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980) develops the causal-historical picture for proper names and natural-kind terms; the extension to a term like doctrine is diagnostic analogy rather than strict application. Gareth Evans, “The Causal Theory of Names,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 47 (1973): 187–208, supplies the crucial amendment — reference can shift when the dominant source of a term’s usage changes, as with “Madagascar.” For meaning change treated as a general and pervasive phenomenon, see Herman Cappelen, Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). ↩

8. See Goodman, “‘Oh Say, What Is Truth?’” ↩

9. Robert L. Millet, “What Is Our Doctrine?” Religious Educator 4, no. 3 (2003): 15–33; D. Todd Christofferson, “The Doctrine of Christ,” Ensign, May 2012, 86–90. ↩

10. See David L. Paulsen’s writings on doctrinal development and the historically conditioned character of mortal formulations of divine truth. ↩

11. Armand L. Mauss, “The Fading of the Pharaoh’s Curse: The Decline and Fall of the Priesthood Ban Against Blacks,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 14, no. 3 (Fall 1981): 11–45. Mauss presents his four-tier “scale of authenticity” — canon, official, authoritative, and popular doctrine — in the section “The Issue of Authentic Doctrine,” explicitly framing it as an operational construct derived from empirical induction rather than a theological one. That framing anticipates the second-order posture of this essay. ↩

12. Anthony Sweat, Michael Hubbard MacKay, and Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, “Doctrine: Models to Evaluate Types and Sources of Latter-day Saint Teachings,” Religious Educator 17, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 101–25. ↩

13. David F. Holland, “The Triangle and the Sovereign: Logics, Histories, and an Open Canon,” in The Expanded Canon: Perspectives on Mormonism and Sacred Texts, ed. Blair G. Van Dyke, Brian D. Birch, and Boyd J. Petersen (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2018), 1–24. Holland’s account of LDS revelatory epistemology reinforces this point from a different angle. Holland argues that although LDS rhetoric often strains toward locating sovereignty in the living prophet, the structural reality of the open canon resists singular sovereignty: revelations proposed by the prophet become canonical only through a sustaining vote of the membership. Holland frames this as a “triangle” of scripture, prophets, and personal inspiration, each of which limits the others. That triadic structure is, in my terms, part of what makes the binding covenantal rather than simply magisterial. Even the highest acts of doctrinal definition pass through the covenantal community. ↩

14. “Approaching Mormon Doctrine,” Church Newsroom, May 4, 2007, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/approaching-mormon-doctrine. ↩

15. Nathan B. Oman, “Jurisprudence and the Problem of Church Doctrine,” Element: The Journal of the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology 2, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 1–19. ↩

16. Ben Spackman’s body of work on accommodation, genre, and revelatory mediation is the most current LDS treatment of these themes, though it is distributed across articles, presentations, and public scholarship rather than gathered in a single monograph; see benspackman.com for a curated bibliography. The quotation later in this essay comes from his FAIR presentation, “A Paradoxical Preservation of Faith: LDS Creation Accounts and the Composite Nature of Revelation” (address, FAIR Conference, August 2019). Blake T. Ostler’s earlier “expansion theory” remains a useful philosophical complement: see “The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 20, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 66–123. ↩

17. Brian D. Birch, “Beyond the Canon: Authoritative Discourse in Comparative Perspective,” in The Expanded Canon: Perspectives on Mormonism and Sacred Texts, ed. Blair G. Van Dyke, Brian D. Birch, and Boyd J. Petersen (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2018), 26–46. Birch develops this comparison at length, mapping LDS authority structures onto Catholic categories of ordinary and extraordinary magisterium, sensus fidei, and the deposit of faith. Birch observes that while LDS theology formally rejects infallibility, internal discipline can produce a “practical infallibility” that operates in its absence — a point belonging to the cultural-closure side of the tension described in this essay rather than to the canonical structure itself. He also coins the useful phrase magisterium via neglectum for the Church’s tendency to retire dubious teachings by omission rather than explicit repudiation. ↩

18. Jeffrey R. Holland, “Lord, I Believe,” Ensign, May 2013, 93–95; David A. Bednar, Increase in Learning (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2011); Bruce C. Hafen, “On Dealing with Uncertainty,” Ensign, August 1979, 63–67. ↩

19. William P. Alston, Beyond “Justification”: Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Thomas S. Kuhn, “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice,” in The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 320–39. The claim here is deliberately modest: not that pluralism is an orthodoxy — it is a family of respectable mainstream positions — but that fallibilism is near-consensus, that single-criterion accounts of epistemic standing have few remaining defenders, and that the weighing of plural, partial indicators is ordinary good epistemic practice rather than a Mormon eccentricity. ↩

20. Charles R. Harrell, “This Is My Doctrine”: The Development of Mormon Doctrine (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2011). ↩

21. Terryl L. Givens, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Thomas G. Alexander, “The Reconstruction of Mormon Doctrine: From Joseph Smith to Progressive Theology,” Sunstone 5, no. 4 (July–August 1980): 24–33. ↩

22. Spackman, “A Paradoxical Preservation of Faith.” ↩

23. See Holland, “The Triangle and the Sovereign.” ↩

24. The Church’s language-availability records — which materials are approved and furnished in which languages — are published in its own distribution and Gospel Library catalogs, and can be consulted language by language. ↩

25. Catholicism and Orthodoxy also distinguish dogma from theological opinion, irreversible definitions from lower-level teachings, and doctrine from discipline. The claim here is comparative: Mormonism has historically bound communion with far less metaphysical specification at the public level. ↩

26. See Birch, “Beyond the Canon.” ↩

27. Eugene England, “Why the Church Is As True As the Gospel,” Sunstone 11, no. 1 (January 1986): 22–25; reprinted in Why the Church Is As True As the Gospel (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1986), 1–18. Both England quotations in this essay are from this piece. ↩

28. See England, “Why the Church Is As True As the Gospel.” ↩

29. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: James Toovey, 1845). ↩

30. To say the boundary was “wrongly drawn” is my theological inference about the relation between past institutional practice and eternal truth, not a quotation from any official statement. As stated, David O. McKay was evidently told the ban could not be lifted yet, leaving many faithful members in a historically complex spot where they feel there is frustratingly too little data to say decisively what is going on here beyond that there is some unexplainable weirdness. The Church’s official claims are narrower: that the restriction was lifted by revelation and that the racial theories used to defend it are disavowed. CND requires only the more modest historical point that a long-standing, institutionally enforced boundary can later be corrected without pretending it had never functioned as a boundary at all. ↩

31. See Hafen, “On Dealing with Uncertainty,” 63–67. ↩

32. On Bennion’s refusal of the folklore justifications, see Mary Lythgoe Bradford, Lowell L. Bennion: Teacher, Counselor, Humanitarian (Salt Lake City: Dialogue Foundation, 1995). Eugene England, “The Mormon Cross,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 8, no. 1 (Spring 1973): 78–86, argued that the restriction was a burden borne by the whole Church and that faithful Saints could pray and labor for its removal. Lester E. Bush Jr., “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 8, no. 1 (Spring 1973): 11–68, is the scholarly treatment widely credited with helping prepare the ground for the 1978 revelation. ↩

33. The Genesis Group was organized in October 1971 under the direction of three members of the Twelve, with Ruffin Bridgeforth as president and Darius Gray and Eugene Orr as counselors. On Jane Manning James, see Quincy D. Newell, Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). ↩

34. Carlfred Broderick, “The Core of My Faith,” in My Parents Married on a Dare and Other Favorite Essays on Life (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1996), 31–51; originally published as “The Core of My Belief” in A Thoughtful Faith: Essays on Belief by Mormon Scholars, ed. Philip L. Barlow (Centerville, UT: Canon Press, 1986), 107–22. ↩

35. Gary James Bergera, Conflict in the Quorum: Orson Pratt, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002). ↩

36. Boyd K. Packer, “Cleansing the Inner Vessel,” Ensign, November 2010, 74–77: the spoken address characterized the proclamation as qualifying “according to the definition as a revelation”; the published text was revised to “a guide that members of the Church would do well to read and to follow.” Dallin H. Oaks, “The Plan and the Proclamation,” Ensign, November 2017, 28–31. The divergence between these characterizations is offered here as an institutional datum, not a criticism of either apostle. ↩

37. Lowell L. Bennion, The Best of Lowell L. Bennion: Selected Writings 1928–1988, ed. Eugene England (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1988). ↩

38. See Faulconer, “Why a Mormon Won’t Drink Coffee.” ↩

39. Terryl L. Givens, People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). ↩

40. Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theology (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2012). ↩

41. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). ↩

42. Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought, 3 vols. (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2001–2008). ↩