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Though it will be months before you read this, the 2002 Winter Olympics have just concluded as I write. I did not watch a single event. Neither did I lodge any protest against the judging. In fact, the one thing that interested me about the Games this year was the host city.
I have been to Salt Lake City only once, and I was only traveling through. But I wonder what this city must be like, the one city in the United States that is dominated by adherents of a particular religion, who worship a particular, and peculiar, god.
The saints who make up the church of Jesus Christ have something of an odd relationship with the Latter-day Saints. In the culture wars, we find that we have a great deal in common. They believe in an objective standard of right and wrong, of true and false. They are theists, though they are polytheists. They have a zeal for the lost. They worship a being they call Jesus Christ, though they believe that he is a creature and not the creator of all things. They are, as a rule, pro-life and pro-family. But perhaps what makes us so tempted to welcome them with open arms is that they seem so well-behaved. In many ways, at least in comparison to your garden-variety American heathen, or the denizens of those cities like Hollywood that seem to worship the god mammon, these are a people who have great zeal, and again by earthly standards, great righteousness.
Like those to whom Paul wrote, we are tempted to commit the fallacy of asserting the consequent. When our ecumenism is riding high, we tend to think this way: “All Christians seek to be obedient to the law of God.” So far so good. “Mormons seek to be obedient to the law of God.” For the sake of argument, we can grant that. “Therefore, Mormons are Christians.” While it looks like a nice syllogism, it is not so. The conclusion does not follow from the premise. Paul says the Jews sought to obey the law of God with great zeal, but they were far from the kingdom. Farther, even, than Jerusalem is from Salt Lake City.
All Christians are indeed called to love and obey the law of God. But God’s command is this: “Repent and believe the gospel.” If we want to obey God, the first thing we must do is concede that we cannot obey God, that Jesus alone could do so. A failure to believe the gospel is a failure to keep the law. The ignorance that plagued the Jews in Paul’s day, and which plagues every legalist in our own, is not merely a lack of knowledge about the person and work of Christ, but a lack of knowledge of the necessary failure of the zeal. Before they need to know what Jesus has done, they need to know what they cannot do. And such is the gospel we are all called to proclaim.