Recovery to Mormonism
Belief in Joseph Smith is required for a temple recommend?
Some detractors of the Mormon Church claim that we put too much importance and weight on Joseph Smith. The above question seems to disprove the Mormon belief that the name of “Jesus Christ” is the only one that can save mankind, especially since temple ceremonies are, in Mormon belief, essential for salvation. However, for Mormons, believing in Joseph Smith—that is, believing that he was a true prophet of God—is simply believing that God restored his Church and that Jesus Christ reveals his gospel to his followers through prophets. Mormons need to have a testimony of the many prophets through which God has delivered messages to Church members. If the prophets weren’t real prophets, then their teachings wouldn’t be true and the whole church would be false. If someone didn’t believe in Joseph Smith, or even the current prophet, Gordon B. Hinckley, that person would have to believe that what they taught was false, and thus they wouldn’t believe in Mormonism.
This requirement of believing in prophets, especially the prophet that founded the Church in this age, is not unusual. If a Christian didn’t believe that Abraham, Moses, Peter, and Isaiah were prophets, then they wouldn’t believe that the Bible was true, and if they didn’t believe in the Bible, they wouldn’t belong to a church that believed in the Bible. It’s not that Abraham, Moses, or any prophet has the power to save anyone, but they teach of Jesus Christ, who does have that power.
Christ sends his servants to teach of him. To believe in Christ, each of us must trust in the words of his servants until we gain our own testimony of Christ. Once we have that personal testimony of Christ, we would still say that the servant of Christ is a true servant. To say that he is a false prophet would be to say that he taught false things and was not from God, and if that were the case he wouldn’t have delivered the truth, and the testimony would also be false. When Mormons profess a belief in Joseph Smith, they are saying that they know he taught truths from God, and they believe what he said. Joseph Smith can never save anyone, but his teachings, which were of Jesus Christ, could. He helped people gain the testimony of Jesus Christ that would allow them that salvation.
Followers of Jesus Christ who lived before Joseph Smith didn’t need to believe that he was a prophet because they didn’t have to believe his words. They needed to believe in the prophets of their day. We need to believe in Joseph Smith and the prophets of our day, because they are the ones that have given us the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, and if we don’t believe their words, we don’t believe that restored gospel.
The reason a belief in Joseph Smith is so important is that he restored that true gospel of Jesus Christ. His words of prophecy and translation make up huge portions of Mormon belief—they had to since it was his job to restore Christ’s true Church upon the earth. If one claims Joseph Smith is not a true prophet, they would be saying that his words are false, and a vast majority of Mormon doctrine is false. People can’t have a recommend to a Mormon temple if they don’t believe in the Mormon Church. If they believed Mormon doctrine to be false, why should they want to go to a temple? Joseph Smith restored the ordinances (ceremonies) in the temple, and if one didn’t believe that he was a prophet, they wouldn’t believe that the ceremonies contained so much truth from God. They wouldn’t believe the ceremonies to be sacred. Mormons hold these ceremonies to be extremely sacred, and it would be inappropriate to show them to someone who didn’t believe them. It is God’s command that they be kept sacred so that we do not cast pearls before swine by letting our precious truths be mocked and scorned.
In both the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants (these are books of scripture in the Mormon Church) it says that Jesus Christ is the only name by which humankind can be saved. There is no other name. Believing in Abraham or Joseph Smith or Gordon B. Hinckley is just to say that we believe that they teach the truth of Jesus Christ, from God. We cannot be saved by them any more than we can be saved by believing in only a single miracle performed by Jesus Christ during his life.