Maxwell Institute Podcast #183: Remembering President Russell M. Nelson, with Justin Collings (Special Episode)

MI Podcast #183- Remembering President Russell M. Nelson, with Justin Collings (Special Episode)

Introduction

From Brigham Young University’s Maxwell Institute, this is the Maxwell Institute Podcast: Faith Illuminating Scholarship.

I’m your host Rosalynde Welch. Today I’m bringing you a conversation with Dr. Justin Collings on the ministry of President Russell M. Nelson. If you’ve read Justin’s volume “Divine Law” in our Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants series, you know that he’s thought carefully about the relationship between God's law and the living prophets, and he’s studied the teachings of President Nelson deeply in his capacity as BYU’s academic vice president. So, I invited him on the podcast in the wake of the prophet’s passing to reflect on what the Nelson ministry meant to him, and what it will mean going forward. I’m grateful that Justin took time out of a busy week to talk with me, and I think you’ll be moved by what he has to share.

Interview

Rosalynde Welch: Justin Collings, welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast.

Justin Collings: Thank you so much for having me.

Welch: Well, let's dive right in. I would love to know what you judge to be some of the most important themes from President Russell Nelson's teaching ministry.

Collings: That is a great and a difficult question. His ministry was so long and so rich and so varied. But if I had to try to gather his legacy, his teaching legacy for me around just a couple of themes, indeed, if I had to choose one theme scripture, it would be 1 Nephi chapter 14, verse 14, where Nephi sees a vision of the latter days and the church of the Lamb of God is beleaguered and outnumbered. And then he says, “it came to pass that I, Nephi, beheld that the power of the Lamb of God, that it descended upon the saints of the church of the Lamb of God and upon the covenant people of the Lord, and they were armed with righteousness and with the power of God and great glory.”

I might not have gotten that exactly right, but the two main themes are,

Welch: Hazards of memorizing scripture, right?

Collings: That's right. But President Nelson taught us how to be and to become the covenant people of the Lord and to receive the promised endowment of power in the temple and through our covenants. And he often used the phrase the covenant path. And I think we might be tempted to turn that into a shorthand for the first principles and ordinances of the gospel. And I think that's part of it. But I think for, as I understood President Nelson's teaching, it was an entire way of life that understood that God irrevocably decreed a law before the foundations of the world and all blessings would be predicated on obedience to the relevant blessing. And you could learn what those laws were. And if you obeyed those laws, you'd receive the relevant blessing. And he applied this as a heart surgeon, and he applied this as an apostle. But he pointed out all these different ways, all these elements of the covenant path that allow us to draw the power of Jesus Christ into our lives by covenant.

And it was honoring the Sabbath, or cultivating the gift of personal revelation, or using the correct name of the church, or embracing the gift of daily repentance. Let God prevail, hear him, generate spiritual momentum, focus on the temple, be a peacemaker, think celestial, rejoice in the gift of priesthood keys, prepare for the second coming of the Savior. All of these were different ways that we could draw the Savior's power into our life by embracing, by making and keeping covenants by honoring the laws on which the blessing of that heavenly power is predicated.

Welch: Yeah. Well, you've said so much, Justin, and you were ringing so many bells in my mind as I'm looking over my notes as I've been reflecting over the last couple of days. I'll just pick out a couple of things that I think are especially relevant. First, absolutely, this idea of the latter days. We live in the latter days. This is the prophesied time when our Father in heaven is pouring out both His power and his blessings upon the covenant people. And those blessings come to us through the law, articulated by his prophets, by means of the covenants that we make with him in his church, in our temples--and that all of that has a very personal application in our lives, right?

For me, the “covenant path” is a way of gathering up all the truth in these big concepts like the gathering of Israel and the second coming of the Lord and helping us see how they should inform our daily walk, right? How on a daily basis we can become a kind of covenant people. This idea of law and the unity of all knowledge I also have recognized as a really important theme in the way that he thought about the integral nature of the created world and the divine order that God teaches us here.

What do you think were the historical and external social factors that called forth from President Nelson this particular kind of teaching, this ministry? Do you think he was responding to anything particular over the last 25 years, especially since his prophetic ministry has come into focus?

Collings: Yeah, I think most immediately he was responding to instructions from the Lord. I just got this sense with President Nelson that he felt like he had his errand from the Lord. And I don't know for sure, but I got the impression that early in his ministry, there was kind of a sequence of messages that almost got seeded. And B.H. Roberts talked about the Prophet Joseph Smith living his life in Crescendo (B. H. Roberts, General Conference, October 1926, “The Mormon Doctrine of Deity”). And it seemed to me like President Nelson's prophetic ministry played out in harmony and in crescendo, leading up to these final messages really pointing us toward the Savior's second coming.

I think the broader societal trends, certainly he seemed to me to be worried about moving away from truth or even the idea of truth. And he taught on our campus six years ago that there are absolute truths that are “incontrovertible” (The Love and Laws of God by Russell M Nelson, BYU Devotional, September 2019). There are laws that you can take as it were to the bank, that they always apply. And I loved hearing him talk about learning that if you change the sodium concentration of the heart, would stop beating. And if you restored it, it would start beating again. And somebody asking, well, what if it doesn't work? It always works. And I think he wanted to provide a secure anchor at a time when so many feel adrift and whether that's with confusion about issues related to the family or anxiety and depression and the mental health that's been so destabilizing for so many.

And the general unrest in the world. I know he was somebody who loved Russia and Ukraine and their peoples and their languages and was heartbroken by the war that we sometimes forget is still ongoing. And he wanted to point people to where they could find peace. I think obviously he was deeply troubled by the divisions in our own country, speaking of the United States, that we need peacemakers. He thought that the saints should play a leading role in that. We can literally change the world one conversation at a time.

And I'll say parenthetically, he was a very practical prophet. On the one hand, he taught great doctrinal truths about the gathering of Israel and the everlasting covenant and the second coming and the Savior's atonement. But then he was able to make it very, as you say, very personally relevant for each of us. He'd say, every time you do anything good, things that the natural man or woman would not do, you are overcoming the world, which could sound like a very ethereal concept. Or anytime you do anything to help somebody draw closer to Jesus Christ and to fidelity to covenants with him, you were participating in the gathering of Israel. Which I loved. It was a way of making every saint and every corner of the planet feel like a part of this great process of gathering Israel, preparing a people who can prepare the world for the second coming of the Savior.

Welch: Yeah, it seems to me that an important aspect of the work that he was called to do was to lead the church into a truly international global organization. And a lot of both his teachings and then the kind of policy innovations that we saw over the course of his presidency, it seems to me were at least partially aimed at allowing Saints wherever they be, around the globe, to be able to access what is the core of the Restoration, right? The core truths of the Restoration.

I was struck as I reviewed some of his early talks how often he referred to international travel, even before he was called to the Apostleship, as a medical doctor, right? He traveled around the world, and he was very aware of the circumstances of members of the church that are very different from the ones that he himself grew up in or experienced most closely.

And so, it seems to me that a lot of the work that he did and the words that he spoke had that international audience of the church in mind. And it seems that he was bold and visionary in understanding how the practices and teachings of the gospel can be relevant for them, in circumstances that widely vary from country to country and from person to person.

Collings: Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. Interestingly, early in his ministry as an apostle, President Benson calls him in and says, you are going to open the nations of Eastern Europe to the gospel. And I think his initial response was, I mean, was yes, I mean, that's just who he was. But there's some question of, didn't you mean Elder Oaks, who's got a background in law, or Elder Maxwell, who's got a background in politics and sensitive to questions of diplomacy? There might be others who have different gifts. He was a heart surgeon. But those were just really, I think, transformative, formative experiences for him.

For one thing, just a tremendous demonstration of faith to go out there and just cold call senior government officials and communist regimes and say, we need to come here. Your people need this message. And I think that gave him a glimpse of really the essence of the gospel. The question of: What can we bring to these people? How can we bring the core fundamental blessings? Also, a deep desire to bring the blessings of the temple to everybody. To say this is something that nobody should have to travel 12 hours for, nobody should have to save up for a year to get to a temple. Let's continue to take the temples to the people in a really dramatic way. I mean, he announced 200 temples of the 382 that have ever been announced. That's more than half, and it happened in seven years.

And at the same time, with this very international sensitivity and traveling and being among the people and knowing more languages than I think any general authority in our history, being conversant in 11 and having some knowledge of 17, I think was was just remarkable. And there are stories of him going through flashcards for his Czech vocabulary, he wanted to know enough to bear a testimony in Czech when he went there.

But focusing on the essentials, to bring them to an international church had a powerfully refining impact on the way we live the gospel in what we used to think of as the center stakes of Zion. To say, are there accretions that we've built up that have gotten us away from the roots? And I think for me, part of the power of his ministry was to say, we're gonna take the needful blessings of the gospel to all the corners of the church throughout the kingdom. And actually that's all you need. There are a lot of things that we have gotten used to or built up that we can trim down so that we can focus more resolutely on the Savior and on our covenants.

Welch: And in that trimming, that allows actually, sort of counterintuitively, for more diversity at the same time. If I were to try to kind of crystallize these two movements in his ministry, on the one hand, there is a kind of privatization in the sense that we're now a home-centered church that's church-supported, right? We're a home-centered gospel that is church-supported. So we don't have the kind of all-encompassing social programs and all-encompassing social life that saints in the early and even into the mid-20th century might have had, right, in the Intermountain West. So there was a kind of privatizing move.

But at the same time, there was this kind of centralized localism, right? Temples now bear the marks and the imagery of the communities in which they are built. Our hymn book will now contain hymns from many different social and ethnic and national traditions. He emphasized, we gather to Zion, yes, but that gathering takes place in our own community. So there's a kind of local diversity that can be added to the Zion project, precisely in some ways because we slim down the vehicle or the package of programs in which it travels. Does that seem right to you?

Collings: Yeah, I think so. And it's a beautiful thing. If you look at the dedications of temples around the world, regardless of which member of the First Presidency or the Twelve is offering the dedicatory prayer, there tends to be some call out to local customs and cultures and traditions. And it's there in the topography and the architecture of the temples. It will be there in our music.

And I think that's a beautiful thing. President Nelson taught so powerfully about focusing on our primary identities. And in a paradoxical way, I think that allows for the flourishing of some secondary identities. He never said those were unimportant. He just said that if they're not anchored in our prime identities, they can get us out of kilter, much as if we don't have our loves in the right order, they can cause problems. And it's not because we love too much, it's that we're not able to love enough if we don't love God first and then move to our neighbor. So if we are first children of God and children of the covenant and disciples of Jesus Christ, then we can be very joyful as Zimbabweans or Ukrainians or wherever we are in the kingdom, can embrace that.

Obviously there are some things in every culture that won't be consistent with the gospel and those will have to fade away, but I think that's probably the lesser part of most cultures. Most traditions we can layer on pretty joyfully onto the fullness of the restored gospel and its simplicity.

Welch: Yeah, yeah, I agree. That's very much how I've come to see it. It was remarkable the speed with which the phrase the “covenant path,” I think he introduced it in 2019 and it quickly became ubiquitous. And I think, yes, I've come to understand that as his prophetic recognition that we'll need an identity that ties together members of the Church around the world, right? And that identity needs to be flexible enough and yet tenacious enough and also minimalist enough that it can combine people with really different outlooks in many ways, right? And so I think the “covenant path” and becoming “children of the covenant” provide for us going forward for at least the next century as members of the Church the kind of unifying identity that we need to recognize each other as brothers and sisters in this project of Zion and yet to be able to live together joyfully in our differences as well. So I've come to see that as a prophetic and inspired innovation to our sense of self as members of the church.

Collings: Yeah, if I remember right, the first person to use the phrase “the covenant path” was sister Elaine Dalton when she was the president of the General Young Women's Organization.

President Nelson picked up on that and just taught so powerfully about the covenant. I was teaching my University 101 students a couple weeks ago about our assigned greeting for the day was President Nelson's message, Choices for Eternity. And they said, probably more intuitively aware of or have more familiarity with these identities as children of God and disciples of Jesus Christ, what does it mean to be a child of the covenant?

And there was a pause and one of my return missionaries said, “well, I think it means we're part of the Abrahamic covenant.” I said, okay, that's good, good. I said, “Was there ever a covenant before Abraham?” And somebody else said, “well, maybe Adam and Eve.” I said, “Okay, good. And probably some folks along the way, Enoch and his people. Was there a covenant before Adam and Eve?” And they start, their eyes started to get a little big and saying, wow, we're going into space doctrine here. And one of them said, “well, maybe in the pre-mortal life, maybe we honored a covenant.” I said, “Yeah, I think you could probably think of keeping our first estate as being a way of keeping a pre-mortal covenant. So maybe there was a covenant in the council in heaven.” I said, “was there any covenant before the council in heaven?”

And at this point they're kind of, okay, well, he's officially gone off the rails. And I said, think of this teaching from the prophet Joseph Smith. The “everlasting covenant was made between three personages before the organization of this earth and relates to their dispensation of things to men on the earth. These personages … are called God the first, the Creator; God the second, the Redeemer; and God the third, the Witness or Testator.” (Teachings of the prophet Joseph Smith, pg 190 - “The Three Personages”)

I said, “I understand that to mean that before the creation, before the fall, before even the council in heaven, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost made an everlasting covenant, the everlasting covenant.” And then I said, “and what did they covenant to do?” And one of my students said, “well, if I had to guess, it would be Moses 1:39: “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” I said, yeah, I think that's a pretty good guess.

And I've just been so inspired by President Nelson's teaching about, when we say the covenant path, “the”, the definite article modifies not just the path, but the covenant, right? This is the path, “the” path of “the” covenant. And there's a relationship with the Father that every saint enjoys, and it unites us to one another. So there's this covenant that's vertical and a covenant community that's horizontal. And I can't think of anything that could be more inclusive, more powerful, more uniting, unifying, and inviting than that. All made possible by the Atonement of Jesus Christ.

Welch: Yeah, I appreciate that. And I agree with the connection you've made there that his emphasis on covenant and his emphasis on peacemaking are very much of a piece, right? That peace, the tolerance and mutual respect– the love really, right?– that unites us, whether it be in families, in wards, in nations, in societies. This peace is the fruit of the covenant.

From the very beginning with the Abrahamic covenant, the Lord told Abraham, right, through this covenant, you will bless all the nations of the earth (Genesis 12:2-3, 3 Nephi 20:25, 27). So it's the power that comes through your covenant that allows us to live in and to be the peacemakers that are called for in this time. It's been interesting to see how enduring that theme of peacemaking has been in his ministry from the very beginning. Early on, it seems he was thinking about unity within the church, right? In the context of kind of culture wars that were ascendant into the 1980s and 90s. And then of course, over the last several decades, that focus has grown and grown. And we're talking now about peace in the world. You talked about Ukraine and Russia. He loves members of the church in both countries and that message of peaceful, mutual respect, consideration–and rooting out the contempt that has so infected the way that we talk to each other, especially in sort of the era of social media and electronic communications, is really needed.

Collings: Yeah, one of my mentors once suggested that most vices have a corresponding virtue, the distorted version of some virtue. But he said, I don't think that's the case for contempt. I can't think of any, there might be righteous indignation. There's no righteous contempt. It's just a never justified emotion.

It was very moving to me listening to the tributes this morning. I realized that one of President Nelson's final public messages was his Time Magazine op-ed, a venue that I don't think any previous president of the church has availed himself of. But it was to the nation and to the world, an invitation to be peacemakers. We had our campus Constitution Day event a couple of weeks ago and the speaker Professor John Inazou, at the end somebody asked, “are we in a constitutional crisis in the United States?” And he said, well, I think we are in a crisis. Use the adjective constitutionally. said, I think if you want to see just one emblem of that crisis, it's we have lost the capacity to grieve together. And this is in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk, but you could cite any number of other examples where it's just a challenge for us even to express loss in a unified way. And my daughter was with me and she said afterwards, so that's a really haunting idea because part of the essence of our baptismal covenant is that we mourn with those that mourn.

And I think there's a role for the Saints to play in reteaching our civic life how to do that. Even something so basic as we can all just be sad together and experience loss together and be united in that.

Welch: And his own life was marked with loss. He lost two daughters in an untimely fashion and his wife, Dantzel. So he knew the sadness and darkness of death. Justin, I'm so grateful for the time you'd spend with us today. Is there any last thing you'd like to highlight or mention to cap off this conversation?

Collings: Yeah, there's so many quotes from President Nelson that are just seared on my heart. I always loved listening to Elder Nelson. His talks were always good. They're always doctrinally sound and inspiring and helpful. But there was a time when I just felt the mantle fall on him and there was just a qualitative difference.

And I remember listening to him and it always kind of seemed like the rest of the world disappeared. I was locked in on that screen and just felt so fortified by words of truth. And I think in addition to all of the individual messages, that's one thing that will always stay with me, was just that experience of a prophet speaking as a prophet, imparting the word of the Lord with all the power and fortifying grace that that brings.

I always thought that there'd never be a president of the church who influenced me as much as President Gordon B. Hinckley, who was the president when I was a youth and a missionary and newlywed and a young dad and a struggling graduate student. It just such a formative time in my life. To be guided by a prophet through it was so meaningful.

President Nelson has changed my life in a way that nobody else ever has. And you should expect it when somebody who's 101 years old gets called home through the veil, but I feel the loss deeply. And to close with just one of many teachings that I could cite, at the end of one general conference, President Nelson said,

“Whatever questions or problems you have, the answer is always found in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Learn more of him, of his love, his mercy, his atonement, his doctrine...” I'm botching the quote here. Before that he'd said, “I plead with you to come unto Him so that He can heal you! He will heal you from sin as you repent... He will heal you from the wounds of this world.” (Russell M Nelson, General Conference, April 2023 “The Answer Is Always Jesus Christ”)

And then he went on to say whatever questions or problems you have, the answer is always found in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. And it's ultimately that, the message of the Christ who heals, coming from one who spent his whole life as a healer of physical hearts and of metaphorical hearts, and who in the process became more and more like the Lord whom he loved and served.

I loved hearing Elder Holland speak this morning about his character because there's just something about this good, good man who spent so many years being so good to so many that just made it refining. It was sanctifying. And he left behind the picture of what a Christlike character looks like. And I think the growth in his character wasn't linear. It was, it seemed exponential, just rising and rising until I guess our telestial sphere couldn't hold him anymore. But what a man, what a prophet. And we thank the Lord for his ministry, which will just change my life and the lives of millions of saints and change the church forever, I think.

Welch: Well, Justin I know these reflections bubble up from many years of concentrated study of the words of our living prophets. So thank you so much for sharing those with us today on the Maxwell Institute podcast.

Collings: Well, thank you for giving me the opportunity. I jumped at it because it was part of a way to process some grief and also just welcome any chance to pay public tribute to such a wonderful man and a mighty prophet.

Conclusion

Thank you for listening to this special episode of the Maxwell Institute podcast. Many thanks to Dr. Justin Collings for sharing his personal reflections on President Nelson and his teachings.

For me, President Nelson’s legacy will be the way he taught us to think and talk about the second coming. He had a keen sense that we live in the latter days, and that the biblical prophecies of the gathering and purifying that must precede the Second coming of Christ were well underway. But he leaned into temples, covenants, and gathering to Christ as the primary way that those prophecies would be fulfilled. He taught us not to look for a series of spectacular or scary events, but instead to recognize that the gathering of the latter days would unfold as a process of making and keeping baptismal and temple covenants as individuals, families, and local Zion communities–on both sides of the veil. He taught us that the latter days are not just a dispensation of time, but also a personal focus on spiritual survival and renewal.

And yet there was no slackening in the urgency of this project: President Nelson’s tremendous acceleration of temple building was the means by which the Lord’s presence on earth would increase in glory until that perfect day when he is among us in fulness. Again and again he taught that now is the time to prepare spiritually, to seek safety in temple covenants, to think and live as if we were already in the celestial kingdom. He circled ever more resolutely around the theme of our personal latter days, culminating in his final two conference addresses: “The Lord Jesus Christ Will Come Again,” and “Confidence in the Presence of God.”

As he said in October 2024, “My dear brothers and sisters, do you see what is happening right before our eyes? I pray that we will not miss the majesty of this moment!” Thank you, President Nelson, our beloved prophet, for showing us that God is at work right before our eyes.