The gospel is universal in that all people, be they black or white, bond or free, male or female, Jew or Gentile are to accept it by coming unto Christ.\u00a0 It is not, however, objective.<\/p>\n
When we objectify a person, we treat them as an object without a subjectivity of their own that can be instrumentally put to our own subjective ends.\u00a0 This same notion of objectivity is at the very heart of the physical sciences in that the objective knowledge or objective truths that we learn give us information that any person can then instrumentally put to their own subjective ends.\u00a0 Thus, when we try to learn the objective truth regarding some phenomena, we objectify it and try to discover that information that could be useful to any purpose. \u00a0 \u00a0 This is what it means to be \u201cunbiased\u201d. \u00a0Put slightly differently, in the physical sciences we seek to discover facts that\u00a0we can treat as objects and we can approach from whatever angle we choose and put to whatever use we see fit.<\/p>\n
The gospel is not unbiased nor is it objective.\u00a0 It is information which is specifically geared toward a single, specific purpose that the Lord has for all His children, be they black or white, bond or free, male or female, Jew or Gentile. \u00a0As such, despite the universality of the gospel, we should not expect the information that God gives to all of His children to be consistent in any way that is objective, unbiased, timeless, acontextual, logical or any other way that does not presuppose a specific end-goal.<\/p>\n
I bring this up as a counter-point to several non-issues which have been circulating the bloggernacle as of late:<\/p>\n
I’m sure there are others, but I think you get the idea.\u00a0 In each of these cases the Priesthood leadership presents information to the church that differs, corrects or even contradicts the information that the leadership had previously given the church.\u00a0 In each of these cases the bloggernacle has inferred that at least one of these presentations of information must have been fallible or false.\u00a0 This inference, however, presupposes that gospel truth is objective when it is not.<\/p>\n
None of these sets of information were ever intended to become the \u201cobject\u201d of scrutiny.\u00a0 Revelation and doctrine were never intended to systematized in any kind of unbiased, timeless or acontextual way.\u00a0 Like the Oracles in The Matrix,<\/em> the Lord and His servants are much more concerned about telling us what we need to hear in order to accomplish a very specific purpose than they are about telling us what any person might need to hear in order to accomplish any purposes that they might come up with. \u00a0This is the entire point of continuing revelation.<\/p>\n The truth of the gospel is a living<\/em> truth which adapts to the understanding and situated-ness of all (wo)men.\u00a0 It is not a dead object like unto a puzzle piece that must square with the other objectified pieces. This, however, does not make the gospel and the truth therein any less universal.\u00a0 We just need to accept that the prophets of the Enlightenment – those prophets that were responsible for the objectivity of truth \u2013 were not the prophets of the Lord.