I fully understand where you are coming from and I agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, you are fighting an uphill battle. The regular “raised in the church” non-convert member has very little desire, inclination, or incentive to dig deeper into the restored gospel. If they wouldn’t listen to the pleadings of Neal A. Maxwell to “drink deeply of the gospel” or to become “grounded, rooted, established and settled”, they certainly won’t bother when ordinary members urge them to do so.

Most members give lip service to personal and family gospel study and true family prayer. They view the church as a social support network to raise their children and provide an “out-of-the-box” community structure. They would not be able to stand independent of the Church from a testimony or spiritual self-reliance standpoint if the church scaffolding was removed.

Now, that does not mean they don’t have certainty concerning the Book of Mormon, the Prophet Joseph, President Monson, the plan of salvation, etc. Its just that they don’t see any need to go deeper because they feel the initial certainty is all that is needed. Going deeper is “speculation” or delving into the “mysteries”. They don’t realize the depth, glory, and wonder to be learned from deeper study, prayer and pondering. They don’t allow the Holy Ghost to provide further light and knowledge.

No. The problem with Mormon Doctrine was that much of it wasn’t the doctrine of the Church while halfway pretending to be. And that would certainly be less so today.

There are two parts here: The first is support / respect for the process of thinking about any and all questions from a theological perspective, even though, as a matter of principle the results will not be normative, i.e. things one “should” believe. And certainly _Institute_ level classes could teach people about the state and history of such thinking, and leave the students to form their own opinion on the merits.

The second, which could come much later in many cases, would be informal ecclesiastical endorsement of a consensus that arises on certain points, and which are deemed by revelation and or inspiration to _strengthen_ members faith and belief. Those kind of things could be discussed in more fundamental classes. The last thing you want is a situation where you have to believe X are you are not a good member, where X is anything not absolutely fundamental.

Now Catholic belief is easy to caricature, because the Catholic Church is _big_, and perhaps most are familiar with the more ridiculous aspects of some parts of it. But if you take a look at the Catholic Catechism, for example, you see those things that have risen to the level of Catholic _doctrine_, i.e. a summary of the teachings of the Catholic Church, those which the church believes every member would benefit by knowing and understanding.

In our church, this happens to a degree already. Some version of this process is used to produce and edit every Institute manual, and to a lesser degree every other doctrinal publication of the Church. The difference is that a catechism is comprehensive. It is not supposed to be a legal document though. It is not a creed.

And I daresay that if every member of our church read and studied the catechism of the _Catholic_ church, our understanding of our own doctrine and tradition (and indeed our faith) would be significantly strengthened.

I don’t think the Church should doctrinalize a comprehensive or systematic theology at all. It tends to set mistakes in stone. The Church could (if the authorities were so inclined) teach the best Mormon theology in a non-normative fashion, i.e. as “tradition” or “ways to approach the problem”.

And in any case, I think it is a bit unfair to characterize non-revealed theology as the “philosophies of men”. At some point people have to interpret the scriptures, and no one, anywhere, does that without committing philosophy. And indeed the interpretations of many who long preceded Joseph Smith bear enormous influence in the Church, and mostly for good, I think.

ji: we would be distracted from the simple and sweet Gospel of Jesus Christ

I think that position has a lot of merit. And it is clearly the one the leaders of the Church have chosen. I just think that in the long run the price is worth paying.

If the Church does not teach a comprehensive theology, a folkloric and speculative anarchy will reign in its stead.

Brilliant!

And what theology that has a smattering of ecclesiastical endorsement over the past half century or so is essentially a return to Protestant theology pre-1830 on every substantive issue addressed. In other words, because there is no LDS systematic theology, the drift is back towards what we traditionally considered the “apostasy”, and the rejection of virtually everything unique about LDS theology from 1835 to 1935. That is what “neo-orthodoxy” is all about, and JFS2/BRM and almost everything that has come out of the BYU College of Religion in the past four or five decades are a case in point.

The merit of the neo-orthodox character of JFS2/BRM style theology notwithstanding, at least they had a comprehensive one, it had de facto ecclesiastical endorsement, and was published in innumerable manuals and other publications of the church.

So for whatever reason (some of them are good) the Church (outside of CES and the College of Religion) has largely abandoned the comprehensive part of JFS2/BRM style neo-orthdoxy, and what we have left is a theological vacuum, where the Church has chosen to specialize in not only having as few teachings as possible, but also in the neglect of teaching what anyone ever had to say about it. The idea is that if we can’t be _absolutely_ sure about something, it isn’t worth mentioning.

So essentially you have a repeat of the sola scriptura revolution of the Protestants ten times over. All tradition is regarded as unreliable and borderline worthless as a guide to faith or belief, and a renewed focus on the scriptures without any sort of theological filter or attempt to unify any but their most basic points. And compared to the Protestant theological tradition, we do this in spades.

And compared to the Protestant traditions, we take the scriptures that are left much less seriously as well, or should I say our treatment (which is a major change from three or four decades ago) of the scriptures is much more sparse. You could attend Gospel Doctrine class, as it is now constituted, for decades and only scratch the surface of what is regularly covered in Protestant Sunday School classes about the New Testament alone.

Now there is certainly an upside to this sort of doctrinal sparsity and scriptural superficiality – it keeps the Church from being embroiled in theological and hermeneutical disputes and transfers the focus away from the canon towards the latest direction and procedures from the present authorities of the Church. But I think it is hard to deny that this approach isn’t largely responsible for half of the things said in Sunday School class being non-doctrinal nonsense on stilts. If the Church does not teach a comprehensive theology, a folkloric and speculative anarchy will reign in its stead.

And that is no doubt why many think we would be better off dispensing with Sunday School completely. And perhaps seminary, institute, and half of what goes on in PR/RS classes as well. The doctrinal classes of the Church rarely serve any purpose that isn’t better served by sacrament meeting. An enormous amount of effort to convey what can be written on a few note cards. Such hours of instruction make sense in a denomination with a comprehensive theology, but with the abandonment of comprehensive theology in the Church over the past thirty years, one wonders what all those hours are supposed to be for, other than a reprise of testimony meeting.

So if the Church is going to stick to the bare fundamentals, for any number of justifiable reasons, perhaps it would be better to dispense with the dead weight of hours and hours dedicated to teaching less and less.