Jeffrey R. Holland

To hear someone so remarkable say something so tremendously bold, so overwhelming in its implications, that everything in the Church - everything - rises or falls on the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon and, by implication the Prophet Joseph Smith's account of how it came forth, can be a little breathtaking.  It sounds like a "sudden death" proposition to me.  Either the Book of Mormon is what the Prophet Joseph Smith said it is or this Church and its founder are false, fraudulent, a deception from the first instance onward.

Not everything in life is so black and white, but it seems the authenticity of the Book of Mormon and its keystone role in our belief is exactly that.  Either Joseph Smith was the prophet he said he was, who, after seeing the Father and the Son, later beheld the angel Moroni, repeatedly heard counsel from his lips, eventually receiving at his hands a set of ancient gold plates which he then translated according to the gift and power of God - or else he did not.  And if he did not, in the spirit of President Benson's comment, he is not entitled to retain even the reputation of New England folk hero or well-meaning young man or writer of remarkable fiction.  No, and he is not entitled to be considered a great teacher or a quintessential American prophet or the creator of great wisdom literature.  If he lied about the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, he is certainly none of those.

I feel about this as C.S. Lewis once said about the divinity of Christ... I am suggesting that we make exactly that same kind of do-or-die, bold assertion about the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the divine origins of the Book of Mormon.  We have to. Reason and rightness require it.  Accept Joseph Smith as a prophet and the book as the miraculously revealed and revered word of the Lord it is or else consign both man and book to Hades for the devastating deception of it all, but let's not have any bizarre middle ground about the wonderful contours of a young boy's imagination or his remarkable facility for turning a literary phrase. That is an unacceptable position to take - morally, literally, historically, or theologically.

Jeffrey R. Holland, "True or False," New Era, June 1995, 6