Test All Things

The argument ends by quoting the Bereans, Paul, and John against the Restoration. Open all three passages and read the verses on either side. Every one of them is ours.

The Bereans Joined

The Bereans are the favourite text of anyone leaving a church. They searched the scriptures daily to see whether these things were so, and they were called noble for it. All true. Now read one verse further than the quotation ever goes.

Acts 17:11–12

“These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so. Therefore many of them believed.”

Therefore many of them BELIEVED. The investigation had an outcome, and the outcome was conversion. Berean noble-mindedness is not a permanent hovering above every claim; it is honest examination that arrives somewhere, and in the only case scripture actually records, it arrived at faith.

Notice something else nobody mentions. What were the Bereans testing? A living apostle. Paul stood in front of them making claims of new revelation, and they measured him against the standard works they already had, and they accepted him. That is not a story about resisting prophets. It is a story about how you verify one — and it is exactly the pattern this faith asks of every investigator who is handed a Book of Mormon.

So the verse is quoted at a church whose entire missionary program is built on it. Ask any nineteen-year-old at your door what he wants you to do with the book. He will tell you to read it and pray about it. He will not tell you to take his word.

Prove All Things — and the Verse Before It

“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” is real, and it is a command. It is also the third line of a three-line instruction, and the first two lines are never quoted with it:

1 Thessalonians 5:19–21

“Quench not the Spirit. Despise not prophesyings. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”

Read them as the single instruction Paul wrote. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophesyings. Then prove all things. The command to test is bracketed on one side by a direct prohibition against contempt for prophecy, which is precisely the attitude the argument is recruiting the verse to justify.

Can you obey verse 21 while ignoring verse 20? Paul evidently did not think so, or he would not have written them in that order, in that sentence, to the same congregation.

What John Tells You to Test

“Try the spirits whether they are of God” is quoted as though John left the criterion blank for each of us to fill in. He did not. He supplies it in the next two verses, and it is not institutional:

1 John 4:1–3

“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God.”

The test John gives is about CHRIST. Does this spirit confess Jesus Christ come in the flesh? That is the whole criterion. Apply it honestly to the Restoration and the answer is not close: a book whose stated purpose is convincing Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, a canon that adds testimony after testimony of a literal resurrected Lord, and a church that puts His name on the door.

The argument substitutes a different test entirely — has this institution ever been wrong about anything? — and then attributes it to John. John never wrote that test. By the one he did write, the Restoration passes and the substitution fails.

This Faith Begins With a Test

There is an awkwardness in quoting the duty to test at the Restoration, and it is this. NO OTHER church on earth begins with a fourteen-year-old refusing to take the ministers of his day at their word.

Joseph Smith did not accept the competing preachers. He read James 1:5 and took it literally, and the First Vision is the answer to a test he ran himself. Strip the testing out of that story and there is no story. The whole dispensation opens with a boy doing what the Bereans did.

And the invitation was never withdrawn. Moroni does not close the Book of Mormon by demanding deference to its editors:

Moroni 10:4–5

“And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.”

That is a book inviting you to test it and telling you how. Add D&C 9:8–9, where the Lord tells Oliver Cowdery he must study it out in his own mind before asking — a rebuke of exactly the passive credulity critics imagine this church demands. Where is the religion that forbids inquiry? It is not this one, and quoting the Bereans at it is like quoting the Hippocratic oath at a physician.

Testing is not the danger here, and it never was. It is the FRONT DOOR.

A Test Is Supposed to End

There is a version of “test everything” that is not obedience at all. It is a posture that treats permanent suspicion as a virtue and never lets any conclusion form, and it borrows the prestige of the scriptural command while doing the opposite of what the command says.

Look at what every one of these passages promises. The Bereans searched and believed. Paul says prove all things and then hold fast to what is good. John gives a criterion so that you may know. Moroni promises that you may know the truth of all things. Every single one of them terminates in KNOWLEDGE and commitment. None of them terminates in a shrug.

A man who tests forever has not obeyed the command. He has only found a scriptural costume for refusing to decide.

Now Apply the Standard to the Argument Itself

Here is the fair thing to do with any claim that tells you to test everything. TEST IT.

Take the version of this argument now circulating, the one that lists four cases where questioners were supposedly vindicated and the Church supposedly capitulated. Run the Berean procedure on it — go to the sources and see whether those things are so. Lowry Nelson is said to have died in 1979, condemned; the archive that holds his papers records his death in 1986, and he was never disciplined in his life. President Hinckley is quoted admitting Hofmann tricked the Church; the very next sentence, always cut, says the forger also tricked the professional experts who authenticated his work. The Church is said to have hidden post-Manifesto plural marriage until 2014; the United States Senate held four years of public hearings on it beginning in 1903, and the Church president testified under oath.

Every one of those took an AFTERNOON to check. So what happens to an argument that commands you to test all things and then collapses the moment you test it?

It has told you which voice was actually tracking truth. Just not the one it intended.

The Verdict

Every scripture marshalled at the end of that argument belongs to the Restoration, and not by clever reading — by plain reading, with the surrounding verses left in.

The Bereans tested a living apostle against scripture and joined the Church he was preaching. Paul commanded the Saints to prove all things in the same breath as he forbade them to despise prophesying. John gave a test, and the test is whether Jesus Christ is confessed as come in the flesh. Moroni asks you to take the book to God directly and promises an answer. The Restoration did not stumble into these verses; it is built out of them.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ has always asked for exactly this much, and never for less. Not credulity, and not perpetual suspicion. Honest examination that reaches a verdict and then HOLDS FAST. If you reject that, you are not rejecting Joseph Smith. You are rejecting Paul, who wrote it, and Luke, who recorded it, and John, who supplied the criterion.

So take the invitation seriously. Test the claims made against this Church, all of them, source by source and date by date. That is not a dangerous request and this faith has never treated it as one.

The testing is not your danger. It is your DUTY. And it has an answer at the end of it.

Related

Test These For Yourself

Citation Traps

  • Acts 17:11 without verse 12 — the Bereans’ investigation ended in belief. “Therefore many of them believed.” Ask why the next verse is never included.
  • 1 Thessalonians 5:21 without verses 19–20 — “Quench not the Spirit. Despise not prophesyings” comes first, in the same sentence.
  • 1 John 4:1 without verses 2–3 — John supplies the criterion and it is Christological, not institutional. The test is whether Christ is confessed come in the flesh.
  • “Test everything” as a permanent posture — every one of these passages ends in knowing, believing, or holding fast. None of them ends in suspended judgment.