Bruce Hafen : My Story of How I Found My Own Testimony

Elder Bruce Hafen is co-author of Faith is Not Blind and is an emeritus General Authority for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In this interview, Elder Hafen details the role of questioning in distinguishing between Gospel belief and knowledge in his own life. He shares his own experience with doubt and with his own questions as he learned to develop his testimony, and offers a refreshing look at how we all need to work to develop our beliefs.

Further Reading in Faith Is Not Blind:

“At nineteen, I didn’t have the words to express my faith adequately—except alone at the pipe organ. The distinctions among knowing, believing, doubting, and wondering are not trivial.  But they are often unclear, because our experience is larger than our vocabulary. . . I try to describe here my personal quest for a more ‘knowing’ faith—the questions I encountered and the vocabulary I learned in seeking answers to them, a step at a time.”

(Faith Is Not Blind, Chapter 2, “Faith is Not Blind. Or Deaf. Or Dumb,” p. 5)

FULL TEXT:

Faith Is Not Blind: Today we have the author of Faith Is Not Blind, Elder Bruce C. Hafen, with us who wrote the book that this podcast is based on with his wife, Marie.

Elder Hafen: Thank you, Eric

Faith Is Not Blind: In this podcast and in the other podcasts based on the book, we’ve talked about faith–faith not being blind and some of the ambiguities and the complexities that we face. The questions we’ve been asking people are about the development of their testimony and about when they were young and what is it that brought them into the Church. What is it that helped them to convert. And so I wanted to ask you was how did your testimony in the Gospel of Jesus Christ develop?

Elder Hafen:  I grew up in a really wonderful home. My parents were models in the way they lived, in what I have come to call the “simplicity beyond complexity.”  They had worked through complexities in their own lives and they were honest. They were full of devotion to the Lord and to the church, but they were realists and I sensed that about them. And I think that helped me because I think I saw as the prophet Jacob said, “things as they really are.”  I think I saw the ideal and the real as natural, as sort of developmental points along some spectrum of growth. And that was just kind of inborn. I couldn’t have put it into words at that stage, but they were wonderful role models. They gave me many opportunities–typical opportunities in a small Latter-day Saint community. I was active in the Church and all the ways that people are who go to church all the time. But despite having gone to Seminary and having been active in the Church, when I approached going on a mission there was a moment of apprehension for me. Because I really couldn’t stand up at my missionary farewell and say “I know the gospel is true.” I had heard missionaries say that. I’d heard people say that in testimony meeting all my life. I’d heard people say that and in my private moments I couldn’t understand how they could say they knew it. What do you mean “you know the gospel is true?” Because for me in my inner honest thoughts I believed it was true. It made sense to me. I can remember at my missionary farewell because this was kind of a big issue for me and I was determined to keep my integrity, I wasn’t going to say more than I knew. There just happened to be a potted plant on the stand of our chapel during this farewell. And I can remember pointing at that plant and saying, “I think my faith and my testimony are like that plant.” I think I’d  been reading Alma 32 a lot. I don’t know exactly what I said, but the idea was. “I believe it’s true.”I don’t know if I would have said that I planted the seed and all that, but that was the idea. I believed it enough to go on my mission and I went in good conscience.

Faith Is Not Blind: You describe your home and I thought it was really interesting that you talk about your parents as being examples of that kind of “simplicity beyond complexity.” And that you said to to some extent you couldn’t quite put that into words. And that plays a role in your missionary farewell. So at what point do you feel like you could put into words your testimony of the Gospel?

Elder Hafen: Interesting that you would use those terms, Eric. I know your love of words and I love words. There is one phrase that has occurred to me in describing where I was about belief and faith, and there so many words used to describe our feelings. I don’t think I could have told you this then, but I can say now looking back, is that part of the problem is that our experience is broader than our vocabulary. I knew what my experience was but I didn’t know quite what to call it. I was sensitive and being honest was a big deal for me. I just didn’t want to say more than I knew. In fact when I went on my mission there was an early experience I had. Back in those days we only spent five days and they called it the mission home. I guess we learned faster in those days. We learned about the missionary discussions to get ready to go. Toward the end of that week  there was a moment when we were supposed to give the first discussion to our companion. We were doing a practice session and then I remember there was a returned missionary who was wandering by and we were all in little groups in a big room. I was talking about the apostasy and I was making the point that Christ’s church today needs to have the 12 apostles just like it did when Christ was on the earth. And this returned missionary behind me–I never knew his name–he said, “Elder, bear your testimony about that. Say you know that Christ’s church today needs to have 12 Apostles. Just say that.”  And it kind of touched a nerve. It wasn’t his fault. But I wasn’t going to say I knew it, but I also didn’t want to be any trouble. So I think I said something like, “I’ll bear my testimony. I will gladly do that, but I have my own way to say it and I’ll do it with real investigators. This is kind of a practice session.”  And he said, “Elder, bear your testimony that you know there are 12 Apostles today.”  And I don’t know why, but he  must have been a little fed up. So kind of quietly–I was respectful–but I said, “Well, actually I think Christ’s Church has 15 Apostles.” And he pulled up a chair and sat down next to me and said, “Have we got a little problem here?” I didn’t know how to feel. I wasn’t mad at him, but I was thinking, “I’m not ready for a mission if a mission is going to be like this. Maybe I need to do something else for a while.”  And then we were interrupted or something. I don’t know what happened. But then I started thinking about what if my experience is broader than my vocabulary? But that bothered me enough to want to say something to him. So what was going on? So in my memory I went back to thinking about how almost every night in the two or three weeks before I left on my mission I would use my key to the St. George Tabernacle–that wonderful Pioneer Building. I’d go in at 11 or so and I had a key to the Chapel to the Tabernacle because I was an Assistant Stake Organist. They had a beautiful pipe organ in the Tabernacle. I’d go in and unlock the organ and the only light in the building would be the little light on the console of the organ. And I’d sit there and then play the hymns of Zion. And sing them. Just me and the organ. And I thought to myself, “What was that about if you didn’t have a testimony?” But it was just me and I was singing my heart out and I wanted to go on a mission.

And I guess the short answer is that during the course of my mission I had a series of experiences here and there that one by one added up to the shift from belief to knowledge–not in a complete sense–in my experience you don’t go from one category to another. And really ever since that time Alma 32 was kind of like my handbook. I am so thankful for that chapter in The Book of Mormon. Because it was like Alma was tutoring me and he reassured me about my insecurities. Because he said, “you cannot know of a surety that my words are true at first.” And I thought, “Oh. I’m so glad to hear you say that, Alma. Tell me more.”  And then he said, “If you can do no more than desire to believe.” And I sort of walked through all of that. Part of what I love about the analogy that is instructive is that it’s a process of growth. You take a step at a time. You know the seed is good, but there’s still a lot you don’t know. So you can have unbelief and belief at the same time. I love the New Testament story about the man who says to the Savior when the Savior says he can heal his son, “I believe, Help thou my unbelief.” I’m so thankful that that’s in there because there would be those who would say, “Hey look. Either you can believe or you don’t.” But in my experience it’s a process of going from belief to knowledge. It’s organic. You grow.

There’s one little example in the book “Faith Is Not Blind” that was very vivid and really significant for me in this sense. I won’t tell the whole story here, but there was this wonderful American couple we met in Germany. And they were about to join the church and then they got a letter from home that really upset them. It was the early sixties. The father’s family told him, “Don’t get close to that church. They don’t give the priesthood to African men.” They were ready to give it all up, but they were tortured by it because they believed it was true. And they turned to me and said, “This is the last time we’re going to talk to you. But we just found this out and we don’t like it. What have you got to say?”  I really had nothing to say except I was just sick at heart to see such good people be in that place. There’s the scripture that says in the hundredth section of the Doctrine and Covenants about the missionaries, “If they will treasure up the words of life continually, in the very moment it will be given them what to say.” And I was sitting there with my mind blank and suddenly I remembered something I’d read in my personal scripture study several months earlier. I’d never heard anybody talk about this and I said, “Why don’t we read Acts chapter 10?” It’s the story of Cornelius where the Lord directs Peter–by sending Cornelius the Gentile to him–that the time has come that the gospel will be given to the Gentiles. It was this incredible revelation that changes the whole history of the Christian World–in fact the entire world. That was just given to me. I had read about it, but it was unmistakable. It was so concrete. And that was one little piece in the process. All  I can say is that in the years that followed–in the years of my mission especially–but here a little there a little, I have come to understand what Alma knows. So now I’m at this stage at the end of the comparison when he comes to the tree and the tree bears fruit and now I know what the fruit is. In fact, it’s only been within the last few years that I’ve finally read Alma 33 and I’ve learned that it’s not just about faith in general. It’s about faith in Jesus Christ. So it only took me 40 years to figure that out.

Faith Is Not Blind: I think it’s interesting how you talk about how there are pieces and parts of your testimony. I think sometimes it’s easy to think that that we have this testimony and it’s a static thing. That when you know, that belief starts to crowd out unbelief. But years later after your mission, you gave a devotional called “On Dealing with Uncertainty” in 1979 I believe that I love. It’s one of my all-time favorites. Why did you write that particular devotional? Why did you feel like you needed to address the topic of uncertainty?

Elder Hafen: I appreciate that question, Eric. I felt a lot of responsibility for these wonderful students at Ricks College. Marie and I would talk about it. We would pray about it and I don’t even remember exactly what it was, except that it was because of my own experience. I kept seeing in the lives of these of these young people–these students and other people I knew in the church or people who were young and kind of getting started–that they would come to the campus and get surprised by something. They would have disappointed expectations. And they didn’t know how to deal with it. And I would see it over and over. And I thought, “My job here–I’m not an educator, I’m an administrator–it’s my job to mentor these young men and women who come here to learn about life and education and the gospel.” I wanted to explain something to them about life that I think is natural. And  so I think that it was called “On Dealing with Uncertainty.” I gave it as a devotional at Ricks College and then I was later asked to give it at BYU. And then somebody at the Ensign magazine published it. That was a long time ago.

Faith Is Not Blind: A lot of those ideas find their way into Faith Is Not Blind. The devotional was in 1979 and then the Faith Is Not Blind book comes out in 2019. What was it about the responses to those devotionals that ended up leading to Faith Is Not Blind?

Elder Hafen: Another way to ask that question–you’re too polite to put it this way–I heard one man say of another man, “He’s still talking about that after 40 years?? What happened is we didn’t really keep thinking about it in any active way, except but we believed in the principles. You know, they’re basic gospel principles. I don’t know when this would have started–in the last 20 years–let me put it that way. I would get approached or Marie would or somebody would write a note or somebody would come up to us wherever we might be–at BYU or BYU-Idaho or a Stake Conference someplace and they would say, “Somebody gave me this old talk you gave.” You can find it at lds.org. And they say, “This helped me deal with some issues in my own life.” I’d given enough talks over the years that it began to be striking to me that–why is it that of all the things that might have been of  interest to anybody, why are they talking about this specific talk?  And as we would talk about it, they’d say, “It’s the internet culture. People are being introduced to questions about the church that we had never anticipated.”  What we were talking about in On Dealing with Uncertainty would apply to this kind of environment. So we began thinking and  kind of poking around, trying to understand it and we just followed our feelings and thoughts. And it just seemed to us that those ideas made sense back then. What had we been learning about these ideas for four decades? And how does that apply to today’s world? What we say in the book is not exactly what’s in the talk, but the principles are much the same. And I don’t apologize for that–sort of like faith, repentance and baptism–and I don’t mean to equate them. But the idea that we learn from experience. You know, I guess I will say it’s very basic doctrine.  When we talk about moving from simplicity to complexity to the simplicity beyond complexity–this is all about Adam and Eve. There in the Garden of Eden complexity hits with a vengeance and it lasts a long time and it’s got many variations on the theme. And then the angel comes to teach Adam and Eve about the Redemption in Christ and why they’re offering sacrifice, not to tell them, “So here’s the deal way back into the Garden.” But it  was purposeful. Mortality is purposeful. The reason I was saying this to help our students in the olden days was simply as an expression of the most basic story in the scriptures: the story of Adam and Eve. And why we come to the Earth is the same reason that they did.

So it’s really important to think of life as not just is purposeful but developmental.

I want to add one more thought, but I want to anchor it to one other idea because it has sort of emerged over time with us. Okay, this is another Ricks College conversation. A long time ago a friend asked me, she said, “You know, Christ is at the center of the temple and at the center of the Gospel. There are pictures of Christ in all the temples. Why doesn’t the temple teach the story of the life of Christ? Why does the endowment teach the story of Adam and Eve?” What a great question. And I couldn’t answer it. And we kept thinking about it–the Religious Problems class continued. And what we came to after a while wasthat  the story of the life of Christ is the story of giving the Atonement. The story of Adam and Eve is the story of receiving the Atonement. And the whole temple experience is the developmental life story of Adam and Eve. It isn’t all at once. It’s development. It’s the process. So whether it’s this the seed that I was talking about or what role does the Adam and Eve story play, these are all the basic motifs and  the most fundamental patterns of the Gospel. And that’s why by receiving the Atonement, we can learn from our experience without being condemned by it. So we can learn from the complexity without  it and the atonement helps us with that/

Faith Is Not Blind: I have one final question: what do you hope readers get from reading your book?

Elder Hafen: I think  we try to say in the book what’s really in our hearts. We believe it  because we’ve  been there personally. And  people we love have been through some of these adventures of trying to find their way. Our hearts go out to them now because they’re ashamed or they think they’re doing something wrong. It’s just hard to learn from experience. And that’s what we want to say: we’ve been there and we know this is hard and we’re cheering for you. We want to kind of throw them a line and send  a message to hang in there. Don’t quit because it gets hard.

It’s like we told the BYU-Idaho students yesterday. We only discovered this in the New Testament account of the Resurrection recently. The wonderful women went to the tomb early in the morning on the first Easter. It was empty. And in the 24th chapter of Luke it says the women were “perplexed.” They see these two beings shining in the light who said to them, “He’s not here. Why do you seek for the living among the dead?” So they go tell the apostles. Luke tells us the apostles didn’t believe/ They thought these women were telling them “idle tales.” Once more I’m so thankful for the candor of the scripture. The apostles thought this was an “idle tale.” They didn’t believe it. And yet they’re sitting there with the other apostles, feeling perplexed when it says Peter and John and the other nine were still sitting there thinking, “What is going on here?” John didn’t know what was going on, but they felt to get up and do something. Sp they ran–they ran to the tomb. The picture we showed the students at the devotional is that great Eugene Burnand painting of Peter and John on Resurrection Morning. And they’re running and it’s as if their faces are saying “I believe, help thou my unbelief.” Nobody had been resurrected before. So to readers of this book, what we want to say is, “Get up and run and I don’t drop out. These are not idle tales.” Peter and John didn’t understand this but they gave Him the benefit of the doubt. There are things they didn’t understand and so they ran to Him. We live in a society that says,“If you don’t get it, give up– especially if it’s some institution; you can’t trust institutions.” But you can trust God and come unto Christ. It may be really hard and, yes, you may feel belief and unbelief. But it’s okay. Unbelief gradually becomes more belief. And we just want to say, “It’s okay. Hang in there.”  What’s that  line from Milton talking about how he hasn’t got respect for a “cloistered virtue?” He says a cloistered virtue is a virtue that “never sees her adversary.” No. You need to see the adversary. And that’s what we mean by “faith is not a blind.” I don’t mean we go and look for the adversary. It’s just–don’t be afraid of opposition or questions when they come because you will overcome adversity and the challenges of mortality by saying and persisting and overcoming. And the Lord will bless you and you will be stronger and better like Adam and Eve. It’s a way of seeing perplexity not as an obstacle but as the vehicle. It probably felt that way a little bit when Peter and John were running to the tomb. Where you think, “Why am I running?” This could be an obstacle to finding out that what I was hoping for isn’t true or what I’m going through is more challenging that I can handle. But it’s those moments where we’re stretched that can also be the moment that draws us even closer to God than we were before.

Faith Is Not Blind: Thank you so much. Thank you for writing this book. And thank you for your message that you’re getting out to everyone. I appreciate it.

Elder Hafen: Thank you, Eric.