While I love going to the Temple, I don’t much love the drive. A few years back, when I switched from 2x monthly to every week, I traded my loaded Camry for an OK Corolla to be able to afford to go more often. I give up the nicer car, the $ and the time because I am doing a service for my sisters that they cannot do.

The church did about 160 years of temple work in essentially just a handful, merely a few dozen, temples; and then will likely have done another 30 to 40 years work in a hundred to two hundred temples, before the Great Day.

All that vicarious temple-work done since the first Nauvoo temple, even including all the duplications, is a drop in the bucket compared to the grand work to be done in a thousand to two thousand or more temples throughout the span of the Milliennium.

Perhaps what’s been done so far is mainly on-the-job practice and training. It’s been a ramp-up, a learning curve, where inefficiencies are expected, and used to gain experience, even if it’s a collective experience. The Lord is letting the church learn by trial and error, on the job, as it were.

As far as blind-spots or empty patches: at the Great Day, the veil will be rent in a dramatic, and literally earth-moving, fashion. We are also told that messengers from the other side will bring information throughout the Millennium. Given that the resurrected and returned Lord will personally reign on earth for a thousand years, and given that not just church members, but likely the whole planetary population will be aware of that fact, it shouldn’t be too much of a shock for everyone to realize that angels will also be visiting, ministering, teaching, etc. After all, if everyone witnesses the Lord’s arrival with a few concourses of angels, later visitations by angels wouldn’t need to be kept secret. The existence of other realms and their inhabitants will have already been made common knowledge.

We currently tend to think that the temple administrators are only able to accept the names/dates/info for ordinances from mortals. But once the veil is rent, what would there be to prevent the temple administrators from accepting names/dates/info directly from angelic messengers?

My speculation is that the heavenly messengers won’t be talking to just the living descendents of the dead, but may go directly to the temple presidents/recorders/workers directly, and say: “Here’s the info, please do the work for these names.” And that would likely be necessary for those dead who have no living descendants.

We’ve been promised that once the “Great Day” transpires, a lot of mysteries are going to be revealed. And along with the revelation of “mysteries”, a whole lot of new policies and procedures will also likely be revealed.

A final thought: Today’s (and the past 160 year’s worth of) genealogists, temple administrators, temple workers, and temple patrons will likely be among those future “angelic visitors” bringing temple-ready genealogy information back from the other side to their mortal successors. The Lord is training us today for future assignments.

One is the group waiver question. If God has indeed issued a group baptism waiver for those who died under 8, it seems to establish the point that God can issue group waivers. The doctrinal question then becomes: why doesn’t God just issue a group baptismal waiver to all souls who died without access to baptism, and judge them on their works of goodness or evildoing at the Last Day? If there is nothing unjust about such a judgment (which seems tough to argue against) and it is within God’s power, why all the busy work doing vicarious baptisms? So we need a “doctrine of group baptismal waivers” to explain this on doctrinal grounds.

The other interesting question is the sociological view of doctrine you have hinted at — the idea that the practice justifies the doctrine rather than the doctrine justifying the practice. In other words, the practice of adults going to LDS temples to do temple work is what is important: it keeps us busy doing genealogy work, it keeps us going to holy places and making covenants several times each year, it makes the temple recommend process a potent pseudo-disciplinary tool for leaders who need to prod a church full of natural men and women into being more righteous and holy.

The practice then explains the doctrine: we need some doctrinal justification to support the continuance of such a useful practice. If the justification wasn’t the necessity of one-on-one vicarious baptism and endowment, we’d come up with another doctrinal justification. After all, no one seriously thinks that if the name extraction program ran out of names, LDS leaders would just shut down 130+ LDS temples. They would come up with a creative doctrinal solution and maintain the existing set of practices.

Also, IMHO, the “they without us cannot be made perfect, neither can we without our dead be made perfect” idea is much more than checking a name off a list of ordinances. The ordinances are necessary, but the development of the eternal, trans-temporal relationships are also essential.

Also, ditto Ardis.

D&C 137, quoted in no. 16 above, was the first work around, and note that it didn’t require our elaborate system of vicarious baptism, but was based on the contrary to fact condition of whether they would have accepted the gospel had they been permitted to tarry.

I believe that some evangelicals take a similar tack (thinking along the lines of Jack’s current series of posts). My recoolection is that there is one of those “four views of” books on the fate of the unevangelized, and the D&C 137 solution is basically one of those views.

I agree that the superiority of our current system is its participatory nature.

D&C 76:71 And again, we saw the terrestrial world, and behold and lo, these are they who are of the terrestrial, whose glory differs from that of the church of the Firstborn who have received the fullness of the Father, even as that of the moon differs from the sun in the firmament.
72 Behold, these are they who died without law;

Yes, if you look at these versus very strictly, then there seems to be no hope of Celestial glory for those who die without the Gospel. But, what good would the work in the Temple be for the dead if that was true? Yes, sections 137 & 138 do clarify that. I even had a Sunday School Teacher who tried to tell us that the dead who receive the Gospel still can’t reach the Celestial Kingdom back in my teen years, but I quoted back:

D&C 137:7 Thus came the voice of the Lord unto me, saying: All who have died without a knowledge of this gospel, who would have received it if they had been permitted to tarry, shall be heirs of the celestial kingdom of God;
8 Also all that shall die henceforth without a knowledge of it, who would have received it with all their hearts, shall be heirs of that kingdom;

Section 76 was revealed on February 16, 1832. Section 137 was revealed on January 21, 1836. I’m glad you pointed this out, since some feel it hopeless for, or cheated by, people accepting the Gospel after mortality.