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

The LDS debate about doctrine 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 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.²

Covenantal Non-Dogmatism is my name for that structure. It does not mean that the Church has no doctrine, that all teachings are optional, or that truth is a matter of taste. It means something narrower and more faithful to the record: in Latter-day Saint life, beliefs and practices do not all carry the same kind of force. Some function as present covenantal boundaries, some function as authoritative but revisable teachings, and much else remains open theological terrain— the mistake is to collapse all of this into a single timeless list and call that list doctrine.

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.

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 acknowledges that it binds people not by dogma, but by covenant, ordinance, and prophetic order, while leaving large stretches of theology alive, unfinished, and open to further light.

The Problem Behind the Problem

The word doctrine has not meant one thing in LDS history.³ At the dawn of the Restoration, Joseph Smith and others used it synonymously with “teaching.” During the correlation era it referred to all official instruction, and more recently it has often meant eternal, salvific truth taught with united authority. That narrowing is understandable. 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. It has 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 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 it was discontinued in 2019 in favor of Come, Follow Me, notably a more pastoral and meditative guide.

In the modern period (since the beginning of the correlation era) the attempts become more self-aware, offering frameworks for the messy question of defining doctrine rather than full-blown systematic theologies. Mauss gave a tiered typology.⁴ Paulsen acknowledged that mortal formulations of divine truth are historically conditioned. Millet proposed overlap among scripture, official declarations, conference teaching, and curriculum and openly admitted that teachings change. Oman offered a thought-provoking jurisprudential hermeneutic of integrity. The 2007 Church Newsroom statement gave what is probably the Church’s clearest public-facing heuristic: not a philosophical theory of doctrine, but a pastoral reminder (aimed explicitly at reporters and the media) not to confuse isolated quotations with binding teaching, to distinguish core from peripheral matters, and to remember that Latter-day Saint faith is known as much by fruits and lived discipleship as by propositions. Holland emphasized incompleteness as spiritual posture. Sweat, MacKay, and Dirkmaat offered the widely taught concentric-rings model, and Goodman analyzed how General Conference itself uses the word doctrine. Charles Harrell’s This Is My Doctrine sits slightly apart from these framework-building efforts: less a model than a documentary ledger of how core teachings have actually developed and shifted across LDS history, it supplies the historical record any second-order account must be able to survive.⁵ General authorities have chimed in as well, offering simple heuristics and guiding principles while neglecting to endorse a dogmatic epistemology or definitive framework: Christofferson gave a more explicit ecclesial account of how doctrine is established through revelation to those with apostolic authority, while Bednar’s doctrine-principles-applications language works as a guide for teaching and discipleship more than as a taxonomy.

Each captures something real. These are valuable contributions to Latter-day Saint intellectual history, and they often build on each other meaningfully as Saints strive for further light and knowledge. To me, it seems that the tradition is increasingly closing in on pure truth, in extremely scientific fashion. But gratitude should not keep us from naming the persistent problem: the hard cases still break the models.

Adam-God destabilizes models that lean on source authority. The priesthood and temple restriction destabilizes models that try to separate eternal doctrine cleanly from temporary policy. The removal of the Lectures on Faith wounds canon-first models, since the original “Doctrine” portion of the Doctrine and Covenants did not remain canon. The Word of Wisdom’s gradual movement from counsel to commandment troubles any model that expects a neat revelatory event marking doctrinal transition (termed “sola revalatione” by Ben Spackman). In case after case, the difficulty is not that clever people have failed to produce the right chart, but rather that the evidence can be sorted in more than one plausible way. These failures are the result of fallibilist attempts to get closer and 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, I am identifying 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 not an outside assumption imported to deflate prophecy; it 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 that it is totally possible that it may contain “the mistakes of men.” Doctrine and Covenants 9 assumes a revelatory process of study, judgment, and confirmation rather than passive download. 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.

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 fantastic 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.”⁶

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. 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. If covenant were defined loosely, the whole argument would be in trouble: the term could expand to absorb any teaching the Church wished to bind, or contract to shed any teaching it wished to revise. The point of defining it this way is to deny myself that move.

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.⁷

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 beyond my scope, but several markers cluster: it is enacted in ordinance or liturgy, named explicitly in baptismal or temple interview questions, and is taught universally across stakes, wards and generations rather than in one region or era. 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 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 current baptismal interview is where this 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. This is a real normative structure, and it is strikingly simple. The propositions required for entry into communion are few and stated at a shockingly 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 thickens as one moves from initial incorporation to fuller representative participation — but even the thickest of these thresholds falls well short of a creedal or catechetical system.

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.⁸ 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.⁹ 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, worship, repentance, service, and priesthood order, 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. 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.”¹⁰

Three objections deserve a direct answer.

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 that recently earned him canonization as a Doctor of the Church is a second-order move, as are Protestant theories of scriptural sufficiency. 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: 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. 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. What would actually be suspicious is a second-order account that guaranteed the present boundary tracks eternal truth perfectly — 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.

The Gift of Theological Pluralism

One reason CND is needed is that it explains — and lets us rejoice in — the almost explosive amount of theological pluralism Mormonism can sustain without ceasing to be itself. Once one sees that the Church binds primarily through covenants, ordinances, worship, and a thin but real floor of binding dogmas, a vast territory opens above that floor. 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.

What holds that pluralism together is not a catechism but a covenantal way of life. Members partake of the sacrament together, covenant together, serve together, repent together, sustain the same priesthood order, and seek the same Christ even while theorizing differently. That is not relativism, it 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 epistemological pluralism rather than by 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.

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

Hard Cases

A prolegomenon to a theory of doctrine only matters if it can survive the historical outliers that make people nervous.

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 made a test of anyone’s 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 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 doctrine. Later, the restriction itself was removed by revelation, and the Church explicitly disavowed the racial theories used to explain it. 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,¹¹ 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/talk, Dealing with Uncertainty.

The plurality of Gods and divine progression. The 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, and 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 doctrine marks a real shift in emphasis, and current Church materials approach divine progression with far more silence and agnosticism than mid-twentieth-century materials did.

Further complicating the picture, countercurrents have run through the tradition from its earliest decades. Orson Pratt argued against a progressing God and defended something closer to a complete, omniscient Deity — one of the flashpoints of the Pratt-Young controversies. (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.) 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. 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. The King Follett Discourse itself was framed largely as exegesis of John 5:19 rather than as “thus saith the Lord” revelation. On the markers given above, the nature 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 Coventantal 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.

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.

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.