RELIGIONLAW Digest - 19 Jan 1998 to 20 Jan 1998 - Special i

[Marvin & Jan Frandsen]

This is pretty correct.  In the LDS religion, God's policies can
change over time according to conditions which the faithful face,
and/or the spiritual progress of the faithful.

This allows for a lot of flexibility, of course, but with the
proviso that this flexibility for the church as a whole is
rigidly exercised from the top in a hierarchical manner.
The LDS Church is decidedly not democratic.

Thus, the manner and extent to which Mormons accommodate to a
larger society is a decision of the top leadership, mostly of
the one man who is President/Prophet.

Had President Woodruff decided/been instructed not to issue
the Manifesto, Mormon and U.S. history would have been very different.

-- Marv Frandsen

>(2)  Back to the Mormons, though.  My sense, which those more knowledgable
>than I should of course correct, is that, in contemporary Mormon thinking,
>both the Woodruff Manifesto (regarding polygamy) and the admission of Blacks
>to the priesthood represented neither "revelation as amendment" nor
>"realization as a guarantee of the truth of an interpretation," but rather
>the working out, so to speak, of a divine time line.  That is, in both
>cases, the sense among many Mormons is that the practice in question
>(polygamy or the exclusion of Blacks from the priesthood) was the divine
>dispensation for a time, but that, once that dispensation had fulfilled its
>purpose, God saw fit to lead the Church into a new dispensation.