9 - Identity, opposition and expansion

Summary

Salvation and exaltation are the two strands of Mormon soteriology that combine in the Church's single nature as a missionary movement. In this final chapter we see how these two messages reflect stages in the development of the group, and how their complex combination allowed it to flourish and expand, despite external and internal opposition. Mormonism was amongst the fullest manifestations of the new ‘missionary’ Christianity of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but, in taking up the dead as well as the unconverted living, it advanced beyond many of the others; this has prompted the question whether it is now becoming the next major world religion. This chapter's emphasis upon Mormonism's missionary nature, in terms of the salvation of converts and of the exaltation of both the living and the dead, finally brings together these two strands of soteriology that have run together throughout this book and highlight them as a key aspect of the movement's ongoing success. To ponder the growth and development of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the opposition it has engendered inevitably involves an account of polygamy and of that Mormon fundamentalism which takes LDS ideas in a distinctly conservative direction, just as it demands a description of the Reorganized movement which takes it closer to mainstream Christianity.

CHURCH IDENTITY

From the outset Mormonism grew and expanded, but not without suffering internal division and external opposition.