When has the gospel been fully on the earth?
We believe that the gospel is still being restored. But when has humankind ever actually had the full picture?
It’s been six years since President Russell M. Nelson gave us as Latter-day Saints this unique, sort of thrilling exhortation:
We are witnesses to a process of restoration. If you think the Church has been fully restored, you are just seeing the beginning. There is much more to come.
Wait till next year, and then the next year. Eat your vitamin pills. Get some rest. It’s going to be exciting.
This was the same year that President Nelson became President of the Church after the passing of President Thomas S. Monson. And he was, for sure, busy in that first year, enacting changes throughout the Church. Just that year, we saw, among other things:
Ministering replace home and visiting teaching
New youth programs, and a long-awaited separation from Scouting
An announcement that a new hymnbook is coming
A revised “Preach My Gospel” manual
An emphatic statement on using the full name of the Church
And in the very next General Conference, President Nelson rolled out the “home-centered, Church-supported” initiative, including shortening the Sunday meeting block to two hours. It was a fun, vibrant time of change in the Church.
But at the same time, I don’t know that these changes, many of which were administrative, are really what President Nelson was referring to in the quote above. While we tend to remember the funny “vitamin pills” bit of that quote, the part immediately before it has much higher stakes:
We are witnesses to a process of restoration. If you think the Church has been fully restored, you are just seeing the beginning. There is much more to come.
In other words, I don’t know that changing to a 2-hour meeting block was part of the restoration. It sounds like President Nelson is suggesting that there are more doctrinal, more foundational gospel pieces yet to come. Much more. This is, in his prophetic words, “just… the beginning” of the restoration.
So, if not the meeting schedule, what is it that’s being restored in the restoration? The term “restoration” gets a handful of different definitions in Latter-day Saint circles, especially depending on if you’re talking about the restoration of the Church or of the gospel, which are recognized as different things in Church literature (click the links). This definition of the restoration is from missionary teaching materials:
The divine return of the Church of Jesus Christ—with its foundation of apostles and prophets, gospel light and knowledge, and priesthood authority—is what Latter-day Saints refer to as the Restoration.
Or there’s this more colloquial definition, from the New Era magazine:
A restoration is the act of returning something to its original condition. It is not a reformation, which alters something existing to create something new. For example, if you wanted to restore an old house, you would rebuild it with the same layout that it had originally. You might want to add a new fireplace, but then you would be changing the house, not restoring it.
The gospel of Jesus Christ needed to be restored because it was lost during the Great Apostasy.
Both definitions anchor, with differing levels of imagery, on a return to something. They express overtly that the restoration is bringing back what was previously on the earth, but was lost. As in the first definition above, we often talk about the restoration in terms of church organization (with prophets and apostles), ordinances (by proper authority), and other restored truths. The second definition perhaps leans a little far into the restoration imagery, asserting that literally nothing can be new (you can’t add a fireplace).
If the restoration is bringing back what was lost, when was the gospel fully on the earth?
Or in other words, if the gospel is still being restored, does that mean that a previous dispensation had more gospel light than we have now? Or is the term “restoration” a misnomer—are we receiving light and knowledge now that has never been on the earth before? If we can assume that the Second Coming will happen before too long—without hazarding a guess as to when—wouldn’t we think that our understanding of the gospel would be more complete than ever before?
We can’t entirely know the answers to these questions, of course. Our understanding of how much has been known by previous generations is limited to what they wrote down in the scriptures which can’t be seen as a comprehensive catalog of their gospel knowledge.
We do have some indications that we haven’t been told everything that prior dispensations have. For example:
We know that some portion of the gold plates were sealed, and not translated by Joseph Smith. We can speculate that the truths found therein are things we’re not yet prepared to hear.
We know that other prophetic books were written that we don’t have, such as the writings of Zenos and Zenock that are referenced in the Book of Mormon (perhaps they’re in the sealed portion).
We know that much of what we do have in the Book of Mormon is abridged, by the prophet Mormon.
We know that some scriptural authors felt constrained by either space to write or the difficulties in doing so. This shows up many times in the Book of Mormon, including here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
And then we also know that some scriptural authors felt that things were too sacred to be written down:
This shows up when Nephi is seeing his great vision in 1 Nephi 14, and the angel forbids him to write everything.
It shows up again, and perhaps most notably, in 3 Nephi 17 and 19, when the resurrected Savior twice prays, and the words were too sacred to be repeated or written.
It shows up one more time in the Book of Mormon in 3 Nephi 26:18, where the Savior taught things “which are not lawful to be written,” language similar to what would later be used by Paul to describe how he can’t detail his vision of heaven.
It’s not a stretch to suggest that we may not have truths that prior prophets and dispensations had. The number of times that the restoration is mentioned in scripture (most of the time using the term “restoration” but also called the “restitution of all things,” to similar effect) is a compelling indication that yes, the gospel has been here in its fullness, and in our dispensation the work is to bring it back.
I’d imagine that most prior dispensations were similar to how ours is currently, which is that they have some light and truth but not all of it. Even the societies in 4 Nephi and the city of Enoch don’t sound like they became Zion communities because everything had been revealed to them; it was because “of the love of God which did dwell in the hearts of the people” and “because they were of one heart and one mind.”
Instead, there’s a line of teaching in the Church that suggests that our dispensation contains the sum of all prior dispensations; that Nephi and Abraham and Noah each had different pieces revealed to them, and that we will have all of them at some point in this dispensation. Joseph Smith called this a “welding together of dispensations.” John Taylor described it as “a dispensation in which all the other dispensations are merged or concentrated. It embraces and embodies all other dispensations that have existed upon the earth wherein God communicated himself to the human family.”1
This includes, then, truths that were taught in Old Testament times, as well as in New Testament and Book of Mormon times (some of which superseded Old Testament, Law of Moses teachings). The inclusion of temples as both a pre- and post-Messianic doctrine stands out to me here. Alexander Campbell, a reformationist minister and contemporary of Joseph Smith, “condemned what he regarded as an amalgamation of beliefs and sacred rites from different ages. While he and other critics held that this combination was sheer confusion, Latter-day Saints insisted that this blending was evidence of the reality of a restitution of all things (Hughes and Allen 146–47).”
If one dispensation had the full gospel, the likely candidates would be Adam’s (presuming that he and Eve were taught the full gospel directly by God) or the dispensation when Jesus Christ Himself was on the Earth. The latter presumes that 1) He didn’t have any reason to leave anything out, 2) He didn’t need to receive anything by revelation from God, given that He is God, and 3) perhaps the Savior’s in-person headship of the Church is actually one of the things that will happen again in this dispensation, as part of it becoming full again. The dispensation of Jesus Christ’s mortal time on Earth seems like the best candidate, by a long shot, despite His relatively short Earthly ministry.
One challenge with thinking about the gospel being “fully restored,” or the church containing the “fulness of the gospel,” is that I no longer picture revelation to prophets happening the way I did as a kid. I always envisioned the prophet receiving a truth or a principle straight from the Lord’s mouth, fully baked and ready to announce to the body of the church. But I think now that prophets receive revelation more like you or I do—as promptings, as ideas, as bits and pieces that need to be put together.
We see examples of this in both Peter’s instruction from God to teach the Gentiles and Spencer W. Kimball’s process in lifting the racial restriction for temple and priesthood blessings (as detailed here). Both situations involved not only divine revelation, but also time—time to process, and time to discuss with other Church leaders, before making meaningful changes. This is not the Hollywood version of revelation, with a lightning strike coming from above. That kind of revelation can happen as well—Joseph Smith literally saw a pillar of light, and in it he saw God and Jesus Christ—but more and more I assume that to be the exception rather than the rule.
Why doesn’t the gospel just come to us in more straightforward ways? Why could this possibly be hard for any of us, let alone for a prophet? And don’t we have a lot of the gospel nailed down already? My primary-age understanding of the restoration of the gospel had a lot cleaner edges than it does now. Eugene England gave my favorite explanation of this:
[Many people] want the term gospel to mean a perfect system of revealed commandments based in principles that infallibly express the natural laws of the universe. But even revelation is, in fact, merely the best understanding the Lord can give us of those things. And, as God himself has clearly insisted, that understanding is far from perfect. He reminds us, in the first section of the Doctrine and Covenants, “Behold, I am God and have spoken it; these commandments are of me, and were given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding. And inasmuch as they erred it might be made known” (D&C1:24-25). This is a remarkably complete and sobering inventory of the problems involved in putting God’s knowledge of the universe into human language and then having it understood. It should make us careful about claiming too much for “the gospel,” which is not the perfect principles or natural laws themselves—or God’s perfect knowledge of those things—but is merely the closest approximation that inspired but limited mortals can receive.
While prophets hold a specific and important position in leading the Church, they’re still mortal, and thus limited. That’s true of our modern prophets, of course, but it’s also true of ancient prophets. Nephi was mortal, and did not understand the gospel completely—he may have even written things in the Book of Mormon that reflect his unique human perspective and not pure light and truth from God. Same with Alma, Mormon, Moses, Matthew/Mark/Luke/John, Paul, and any other prophetic or inspired individual who has ever lived. Our Heavenly Parents have always relied on imperfect people, assembling brick-by-brick a church that has, does, and will continue to have imperfections and flaws that advertise the mortality of its builders.
For me, the idea of ongoing restoration includes a great deal of hope. There are policies and practices in the Church that leave some people feeling left out and marginalized. There are things in Church history that are difficult to understand. And there is doctrine that we are doing our best to understand, but probably aren’t getting right all the time.
I believe that this is not only God’s church, but that our Heavenly Parents don’t expect us to ace the test after only being taught part of the material. The restoration is ongoing the same way our individual faith journeys are ongoing; when we learn something new we can add it into what we already understand. And eventually, whether in this life or the next, we’ll have a fulness of it.
It gives me hope. And makes it worth taking my vitamin pills.
Journal of Discourses 21:94. As found here.