Some of you here likely knew Stephen
Webb; the Catholic scholar and writer who came to view our church and its
teachings with great respect. He collaborated with some of the faculty here on
books and other projects. My wife and I spent a day with him and his family and
came to admire and respect him and thereafter exchanged occasional emails. When
the open house for the Indianapolis Indiana Temple was held, we arranged a VIP
tour for him and his family. Elder Kent F. Richards, then the executive director
of the Temple Department, was kind enough to lead that tour. A few days later,
I received an email from Stephen. He did not ask me to hold it in confidence,
and so I will share just a few lines:
Dear Richard,
It was such a blessing to be at the
temple last Wednesday. I never dreamed I would see the inside of one, and it
met my every expectation. The combination of understated beauty and dignified
elegance made for a holy atmosphere, and the focus on Christ was overwhelming.
. . .
The highlight was sitting with my wife in the sealing room, on the very spot
where couples sit to be sealed.
He continues:
The sublimity of the LDS view of
heaven and how important it is how it shows most other churches, well, all
other churches, actually, to have very trivial and mild and lackluster views of
heaven [was evident]. We’ve lost heaven, I’m afraid, its realty, its presence,
but Mormons haven’t. You will have to carry on so much of the faith for the
rest of us, until we can catch up to you . . . So much of Western Christianity
is all about obtaining a vision of God in the end, becoming one with God, which
erases our individuality and threatens to collapse any real diversity into an
eternal monism. But Mormon eschatology preserves real plurality.
He concludes:
Really, I could to on, Richard! I am
more convinced than ever that the Saints have truly provided an extensive list
of corrections, or restorations, to the church, where we have lost our way, and
I hope to be counted a fellow traveler, someone following the Saints at a
distance perhaps, but only because that permits me to draw attention to the
path the Saints have laid out for the restoration of a fully and truly robust faith
in Jesus Christ.
Steve
Pretty powerful stuff, I would say—an outsider’s
witness to the Restoration! (Richard G. Hinckley, “Witnesses of the Restoration
and Resurrection,” in He Was Seen: Witnessing the Risen Christ, ed.
David Calabro and George A. Pierce [Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center;
Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2024], 10-11)
